This post seems like somebody looking for an excuse to attack "the cloud". AWS's issues last week were caused by a whole datacenter going down, due to an electrical storm. No matter what your configuration is, whether you use cloud hosting or traditional hosting, losing a datacenter is going to throw a wrench in things. Even if your failover works perfectly, the increased load on whatever you fail to might bring things down.

The procedure for high availability is the same for cloud hosts as traditional hosts: multiple datacenters and multiple providers. If somebody made the decision to only host only with amazon and only in US-East, the traditional hosting alternative to that is not a high-availability network spanning 5 datacenters. You're comparing apples to oranges. You can host with AWS across multiple regions, just like you can host with any other provider in multiple datacenters.