No, but it does reflect the dangers of incentivizing everyone to use a single region.

Most people (myself include) only choose it because its the cheapest. If multiple regions were the same price then there'd be less impact if one goes down.

The problems with us-east-1 have been apparent for a long time, many years. Once I started using us-east-1 long ago, and seeing the problems there, I moved everything to us-west-1 and stopped having those problems. EC2 instances were completely unreliable in us-east-1 (we were running hundreds to thousands at a time), not so in us-west-1. The error rates we were seeing were awful in us-east-1.

A negligible cost difference shouldn't matter when your apps are unstable due to the region being problematic.

> A negligible cost difference shouldn't matter when your apps are unstable due to the region being problematic.

agreed, but a sizable cohort of people don't have the foresight or incentives for think past their nose and clicking the cheapest option.

So its on Amazon to incentivize what's best.

People's lack of curiosity, enough to not even explore the other options, is not Amazon's problem.