This is all built on Quinn's assertion that us-east1 outage means a global depression, but if anything us-east1 has a well-deserved reputation for being the flakiest AWS region and there have been repeated severe outages, most recently in 2017 (S3 basically down) and Nov 2020 (Kinesis and all services relying on it down):
Sure, we haven't had a total outage where everything is offline for days on end, but I don't rate any of the scenarios as being particularly likely. Even things like geomagnetic storms and nuclear EMP would mostly impact power transmission, not the data centers themselves, especially if there's advance notice.
> (...) if anything us-east1 has a well-deserved reputation for being the flakiest AWS region and there have been repeated severe outages, most recently in 2017 (S3 basically down) and Nov 2020 (Kinesis and all services relying on it down)
I'm not sure S3 or Kinesis outages, or any other higher level service and serverless offerings, count as outages in this context, specially as they are quickly recoverable.
I believe the scenario involves something like, say, all EC2 dying or no traffic getting in or out for a few weeks. Think Katrina but on us-east-1.
S3 is about as low level as it gets, if S3 is having a bad day a lot of things will come to a grinding halt.
Yet while S3 going down in 2017 generated a lot of headlines, there was no systemic impact like (say) the stock market tanking. Which leads me to think that most (not all, but most) really critical stuff will have backups outside us-east1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service...
Sure, we haven't had a total outage where everything is offline for days on end, but I don't rate any of the scenarios as being particularly likely. Even things like geomagnetic storms and nuclear EMP would mostly impact power transmission, not the data centers themselves, especially if there's advance notice.