TLDR; Someone on the team ran a command by mistake that took everything down. Good, detailed description. It happens. Out of all of Amazon's offerings, I still love S3 the most.
The only thing I read in there and go "hmmm" is that it took quite that long for the S3 service to recover, and that the status page wasn't hosted on someone that doesn't have an S3 dependency. That's just a plain "doh" moment :)