There are a LOT of far softer targets that go unprotected. A terrorist attack on a sewage plant for a major city would be far more devastating than knocking out a few websites.
There's probably a moderate amount of unseen security in larger areas surrounding water/sewage plants.
Also, we've dealt with regional natural disasters before. Drought, fire, flooding, etc - we have experience mobilizing resources and redistributing as needed.
We've never dealt with an extended outage of one or more AWS data centers for days at a time. How many govt/university systems would be unable to function because of direct or indirect dependencies on AWS-related services?
S3 going down for, let's say 4 days, would cause big havoc on so many projects and systems I know of.
I'm pretty sure most people have no clue how much of their data and systems functionality is reliant on AWS-related services.
Water outages happen often enough - they distribute water manually with tanker trucks. When sewage is overwhelmed it overflows into a river and they tell people to not go for a swim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitary_sewer_overflow
Some people wouldn't be able to do their computer work, send receive emails, others might not receive their paychecks or be able to pay bills.
It wouldn't surprise me if those police systems have moved, or are moving, to Azure or AWS data centers.
If you hit AWS, just Netflix alone is going to effect 100 million people. There are definitely a few payroll providers that are going to have some reliance, so people all over are going to stop receiving their paycheques. Many businesses will be temporarily disabled.
On a national level we've got a lot more eggs concentrated in the AWS baskets than we do the sewage treatment baskets.
However, we actually have evidence that a sewage plant for a major western city can suffer a sudden catastrophic failure[1] and it won't even make it above the fold.
