Are they though? Let’s look at what the recent AWS outages have been: a single region (but AWS makes multi-region easy). The biggest impact to most people is the AWS console, something that one seldom actually needs given AWS is API driven. If the same type of outage happened on OVH then you’d lose KVM to your physical servers. But you seldom need those either.

The Azure outage was just AD service but you can roll your own there if you wanted.

Plus if you want to talk about SaaS then OVH et al have their own SaaS too. In fact the difference between OVH and AWS is more about scale than it is about reliability (with AWS you can buy hardware and rack it in AWS just like with OVH too).

Or maybe by “old skool” you mean the few independent hosts that don’t offer SaaS. However they’re usually pretty small fry and this outages are less likely to be reported. Whereas any AWS service going down is massive news.

I’m not a cloud-fanboy by any means (I actually find AWS the least enjoyable to manage from a purely superficial perspective) but I’ve worked across a number of different hosting providers as well as building out HA systems on prem and the anti-cloud sentiment here really misses the pragmatic reality of things.

That's fair enough, I was comparing single-AZ AWS outages to single-DC Hetzner outages, since that seems to be what people are focusing on. For multi-DC deployments, I think laumars' sibling response to mine makes a much better argument—ultimately, you're still choosing who to pay and who to trust, and if things go down, there's nothing you can do to fix it. "Low-tech" cloud providers like Hetzner, Colo providers, amazon, PaaS—in a physical downtime event like this one, they're all the same.