It seems like it was a warning shot to show what they can do. Imagine the impact to the US if this had gone on for, what, days? Weeks? Is there any reason it couldn't continue indefinitely? It could be as devastating as a nuclear bomb detonation... One of the most profound effects would be the lack of trust everyone would now have for the services (etc) they rely on. The SaaS business model would become extinct overnight, and nothing important would be in the cloud. We'd all go back to desktop first applications, and all the enormous investment in cloud technology would be vaporized. If you don't trust the reliability of the internet, why would you rely on AWS and the like. You wouldn't.

But perhaps this is a smarter approach: build software and services in the most reliable way possible: offline enabled without the assumption of mostly available internet. Oh, and VOIP phone service? Gonzo. Where I work that was the worst effect of the outage. The phones simply didn't work... And we're basically a sales company. Not a lot of sales were made that day...