It really is failing more, and it’s well known amongst industry experts. It’s the oldest, largest, and most utilized region of AWS.

I’ve heard people say that the underlying physical infrastructure is older, but I think that’s a bit of speculation, although reasonable. The current outage is attributed to a “thermal event”, which does indeed suggest underlying physical hardware.

It’s also the most complex region for AWS themselves, as it’s the “control pad” for many of their global services.