[kevan]

Funnily enough floods (GCP) and fires (OVH) are two of the 3 things AWS explicitly mentions in the Well Architected docs. For a lot of companies an AZ going down is an annoyance or bad day but a whole region going down could be a real continuity risk.

> Each Availability Zone is separated by a meaningful physical distance from other zones to avoid correlated failure scenarios due to environmental hazards like fires, floods, and tornadoes.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reliabili...

[jamesfinlayson]

> but a whole region going down could be a real continuity risk

Very much so - Australia only got a second region this year, so if your work required data to remain in Australia, you just had to hope that ap-southeast-2 didn't have a major issues. I'm sure there are plenty of other countries with only a single region.