Yeah I think there are a number of "hidden" dependencies on different regions, especially us-east-1. It's an artifact of it being AWS' largest region, etc.
us-east-2 does exist; it’s in Ohio. One major issue is a number of services have (had? Not sure if it’s still this way) a control plane in us-east-1, so if it goes down, so does a number of other services, regardless of their location.
Seems the underlying issue is with DynamoDB, according to the status page, which will have a big blast radius in other services. AWS' services form a really complicated graph and there's likely some dependency, potentially hidden, on us-east-1 in there.
us-east-1 was, probably still is, AWS' most massive deployment. Huge percentage of traffic goes through that region. Also, lots of services backhaul to that region, especially S3 and CloudFront. So even if your compute is in a different region (at Tower.dev we use eu-central-1 mostly), outages in us-east-1 can have some halo effect.
This outage seems really to be DynamoDB related, so the blast radius in services affected is going to be big. Seems they're still triaging.
> This looks to me like they are acknowledging that their claims were premature, possibly due to claims of false advertising, but are otherwise carrying forward as they were.
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