So your theory is that problems with friends list are keeping people in 30+ minute queues to play the game? Because otherwise you are straw manning me. I agree

So your theory is that problems with friends list are keeping people in 30+ minute queues to play the game? Because otherwise you are straw manning me. I agree, just throwing AWS at the problem doesn't solve it, as demonstrated by this catastrophe. On the other hand, many people, including OP have managed to build scalable gaming systems on top of AWS where EA/Maxis for the moment appear to have failed quite dramatically. Yes it's a hard problem, but it doesn't seem off base distilling the OP's argument down to "they have done the cloud wrong".