Putting on my conspiracy robe, I was thinking the recent Facebook outage had more to it, and was essentially 'chaos engineering'[0]. Think of the outage as a sort of 'dry run' for when disaster happens, and documenting the impact and preventing future outages (like earth getting hit by a sun flare or a cosmic ray). AWS going down could very well have been a deliberate chaos engineering tactic?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering