[untog]

lot of services still run on their datacenters or on-premise servers, or maintain a hot backup that they can switch to immediately.

I'm not an idiot, I'm well aware of that. My point is that when a large number of consumer-facing sites go down, users (who aren't aware of Amazon cloud servers) simply assume something is wrong with the internet.

Obviously if you have a mission critical service this isn't acceptable. But for a lot of average sites/apps it might not be worth the investment in time/effort to cover relatively small outages such as these.

I'm afraid this is pretty much getting the entire cloud thing wrong.

Not really. It's the utility of the cloud - if there's an outage there are already a lot of people working to fix it. If you're self-hosted, that's on you.

[tedunangst]

The first thing I do when Netflix goes down is complain on Facebook. Facebook up, Netflix down? It's not the Internet that's broken.

[kordless]

> I'm not an idiot

Nobody called you an idiot.

> I'm afraid this is pretty much getting the entire cloud thing wrong.

This was in reference to your comment "most users will assume the internet is broken". In the context of "it's OK because the customer thinks everything is down" the comment would be completely appropriate. It's being done wrong if this is the way we approach things.