Ummm. I’ve def been unable to do anything for entire days because our AWS region went down and we had to rebuild the database from scratch. AWS goes down, you twiddle your thumbs and the people you report to are going to be asking why, for how long, etc. and you can’t give them an answer until AWS comes back to see how fubar things are.

When your own hardware rack goes down. You know the problem, how much it costs to fix it, and when it will come back up; usually within a few hours (or minutes) of it going down.

Do things catch fire, yes. But I think you’re over-estimating how often. In my entire life, I’ve had a single SATA connector catch fire and it just melted plastic before going out.