This is unfortunately the norm. Like when AWS S3 went down (but couldn't update its own status images because they're in S3 and we all laughed) and along with it went Alexa, lambda, and every other service dependent on S3.
S3 is really the one of the few services on aws that can do that unfortunately. It has no concept of zone/region, it's truly global. To me it seems like a serious design flaw, as everything else in aws is striped by region, but not sure why exactly it was built like that.
edit:
nvm s3 has regions, it's the bucket names that are global.
Buckets are globally addressable because they planned for each S3 bucket + object key to have an associated URL (actually several), and URLs are a global namespace.
Given the historical context (S3 launched 12 years ago, 5 months before EC2 launched with the us-east-1 region), it's reasonable that S3 buckets were global because regions didn't really exist yet as a concept.
If you look at the docs now[1], new buckets are regionalized and the region is in the URL for non-us-east-1 regions.
Got it, makes sense. So the only way you'd have a global bucket is if you created it before a certain date (whenever they were regional-ized, I assume). Thanks!
edit:
nvm s3 has regions, it's the bucket names that are global.