Am I missing something about us-east-1 reliability ?
https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+reliability https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+outage
https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+reliability https://www.google.com/search?q=us-east-1+outage
us-east-1 does have more problems than other zones due to a variety of reasons, but it rarely (ie, once a few years) goes down as a whole. As long as you're in several AZs within us-east-1, the impact of most outages should not take you down completely. In the context of the comment you are replying to, your google search links are lazy and fail to see the big picture.
(p.s. the use of a google search vs direct results wasn't "lazy" - it's to allow readers to do their own research vs pasting one result and then getting accused of bias)