> it was well-known that all the AWS management was hosted out of a single zone, and there were several days we had to cancel class because us-east-1 had an outage

Maybe you mean region, because there is no way that AWS tools were ever hosted out of a single zone (of which there are 4 in us-east-1). In fact, as of a few years ago, the web interface wasn’t even a single tool, so it’s unlikely that there was a global outage for all the tools.

And if this was later than 2012, even more unlikely, since Amazon retail was running on EC2 among other services at that point. Any outage would be for a few hours, at most.