[outworlder]

> If such a physical event had happened in AWS it would have been a non-event with things just failing over to other AZs.

In many cases in AWS an availability zone is actually composed of multiple datacenters, each with their own redundancies. This may not be true for smaller regions, but in large ones it definitely is. In those cases, losing an entire datacenter would maybe take out a percentage of instances in that AZ. This has happened before and our production systems barely noticed other than provisioning new nodes to replace the failed health checks.