IMO, it's both more incidents and more honesty. AWS can be flaky without getting a status update.
Possible. AWS isn't exactly quick to update their systems but since that last outage in us-east that took out Netflix I don't recall anything since that has any impact in my systems and that was over a year ago.
We use S3, EC2, DynamoDB, RDS, SNS, SES, Route53, Elastic Beanstalk, Kinesis, Lambda, Elasticache, and probably even some of the others.