I don't think the analogy is correct: suppose that John needed to buy life saving medicines. Would his course of action be reasonable and rational? No, because he would be dead. On mission critical systems you make damn well sure in advance you have a backup plan (or more if needed). John should have bought an extra set of medicines, and AWS should have had better backup plans - it seems to me that if it's taking so long to bring the systems up, there must be something not really well thought of there.