That's the wrong analogy though. We're not talking about the supplier - I'm sure Amazon is doing its damnedest to make sure that AWS isn't going down.

The right analogy is to imagine if businesses that used electricity took that stance, and they basically all do. If you're a hospital or some other business where a power outage is life or death, you plan by having backup generators. But if you're the overwhelming majority of businesses, you do absolutely nothing to ensure that you have power during a power outage, and it's fine.

But that is the stance for a lot of electrical utilities. Sometimes weather or a car wreck takes out power and since its too expensive to have spares everywhere, sometimes you have to wait a few hours for a spare to be brought in

The electric grid is much more important than most private sector software projects by an order of magnitude.

Catastrophic data loss or lack of disaster recovery kills companies. AWS outages do not.

Isn't that basically Texas?

Fortunately nearly all services running on AWS aren't as important as the electric utility, so this argument is not particularly relevant.

And regardless, electric service all over the world goes down for minutes or hours all the time.

Utility companies do not have redundancy for every part of their infrastructure either. Hence why severe weather or other unexpected failures can cause loss of power, internet or even running water.

Texas has had statewide power outages. Spain and Portugal suffered near-nationwide power outages last year. Many US states are heavily reliant on the same single source for water. And remember the discussions on here about Europe's reliance on Russian gas?

Then you have the XKCD sketch about how most software products are reliant on at least one piece of open source software that is maintained by a single person as a hobby.

Nobody likes a single point of failure but often the costs associated with mitigating that are much greater than the risks of having that point of failure.

This is why "risk assessments" are a thing.

> imagine if the electricity supplier too that stance.

Imagine if the cloud supplier was actually as important as the electricity supplier.

But since you mention it, there are instances of this and provisions for getting back up and running:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

Peacetime = When not actively under a sustained attack by a nation-state actor. The implication being, if you expect there to be a “wartime”, you should also expect AWS cloud outages to be more frequent during a wartime.

Its a different kind of outage when the government disconnects you from the internet. Happens all the time, just not yet in the US.