Well, the Amazon Senior VP of International Retail said this was the case in his talk for the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership series. So, seems there's some dispute within the company. But I suppose I should take Werner's word for it since he's the CTO.

It was premeditated and planned using all new capacity. I chatted with Chris Pinkham, who architected and was VP of Engineering for EC2. I also verified with Chris Brown, who was development lead for EC2 and Ben Black who was leading networking.