Weird, was just there a month ago for two weeks and used https://www.expressvpn.com/ with no issue. I mostly cruised reddit / the internet so maybe there wasn't enough volume.
It depends. I am a bit surprised that reddit is not blocked. Neither is hackernews. Apart from classic Google, Facebook, Twitter, AWS is targeted intensely for its role in "affiliated freedom", to the point releases on github are blocked, others not as much.