TF makes API calls to the underlying cloud. If those hang, you'll have to wait for them to time out.
Whether TF can update the state & release its locks would depend on where those were hosted. If they're in the downed AZ, then ofc. it can't do that, and manual intervention will be required afterwards. I forget if you can make those objects regional when stored in AWS or not. (You can in some other storages.)
Fun fact, for a lot of providers, it'll hang on any error, not just cloud ones. I presume it's due to the gRPC communication mechanism and the terraform binary blocking until the provider answers "yes or no" to the request
Nothing is perfect, there’s probably good reason for this behaviour … but it is rarely something that happens anyway. and you know, deleting a key for the state lock (one that explicitly tells you when and who created it) ain’t that hard or a that big of a deal.
I think any system is susceptible to problems like this if the underlying hardware becomes unavailable. Using dynambodb to obtain locks on s3 is a pretty common pattern in AWS development. This has more to do with AWS than Terraform.
Whether TF can update the state & release its locks would depend on where those were hosted. If they're in the downed AZ, then ofc. it can't do that, and manual intervention will be required afterwards. I forget if you can make those objects regional when stored in AWS or not. (You can in some other storages.)
… what would you expect to happen here?