[JoRyGu]

AWS goes down catastrophically but are back up in minutes/hours most of the time (as long as they aren't down because Iran blew up their data center). That's obviously REALLY bad for certain industries, but I suspect for the vast majority of their customers it's not a big deal. We've been able to isolate the damage almost every time just by having AZ failover in place and avoiding us-east-1 where we can.

[graemep]

Failover is supposed to protect you every time, unless something really exceptional happens.

While its possible to to isolate the effects, judging by how many things stop working when there is an AWS failure a lot of people fail to do that. I think the shit of responsibility to AWS removes the incentive to put effort into resilience against AWS failure.

[ajross]

> AWS goes down catastrophically but are back up in minutes/hours most of the time

The outage in the linked article appears to have been resolved in 4-5 hours.