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.
> 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.