that's completely untrue. there are many ways to do fault-tolerance in AWS. it's expensive, but it's possible. netflix even goes as far as simulating the failure of entire aws regions in their simian army testing suite:
That's why Netflix stays up when us-east or us-west are down.
Netflix is down.
Works fine for me
It is true. Amazon offloads a decent amount of fault tolerance to the application provider, as you point out here. I will also mention that Netflix does not solely rely on Amazon for running their services. They run their own decentralized caching layer: https://openconnect.netflix.com/deliveryOptions/