For legacy customers, it's hard to move regions, but in general, if you have the chance to choose a region other than us-east-1, do that. I had the chance to transition to us-west-2 about 18 months ago and in that time, there have been at least three us-east-1 outages that haven't affected me, counting today's S3 outage.
EDIT: ha, joke's on me. I'm starting to see S3 failures as they affect our CDN. Lovely :/
[1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/restocks.io/robots.txt
[2]: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/restocks.io/robots.txt
I think the problem is globally accessible APIs are impacted. As others have noted, if you can use region/AZ-specific hostnames to connect, you can get though to S3.
CloudFront is faithfully serving up our existing files even from buckets in US-East.
EDIT: less arrogant. I need a coffee.
Even data replication has options for this, too.
And I work in Ops.
HashiCorp's Terraform makes it a lot easier to go multi Cloud, and abstracting away configuration of the OS and applications/state with Ansible makes the whole process a lot easier too.
Q: Why computers don't crash at the same time?
A: Because network connections are not fast enough.
(I think we are starting to get there)
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and didn't test this, but some other comment makes that clear).
EDIT: Found my answer. "Just to stress: this is one S3 region that has become inaccessible, yet web apps are tripping up and vanishing as their backend evaporates away." -- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/28/aws_is_awol_as_s3_g...
