While I agree this is a good thing, the central issue in my mind is that AWS lead a lot of folks to believe that spanning their application across multiple avai

While I agree this is a good thing, the central issue in my mind is that AWS lead a lot of folks to believe that spanning their application across multiple availability zones was a way to protect against AWS's own failures. They spoke at YC a few months back and recommended this as a primary strategy for dealing with failure. None of their engineers or staff recommended spanning applications across different physical locations. When all of the dust settles on this mess, thats the one question I'll be demanding from AWS. Also, how will they prevent multiple AZ's from going down simultaneously in the future?