> A disgruntled employee (or a few) seems the most likely scenario for something that could cause an extended outage.
That's highly unlikely given the fact that a region like us-east-1 is comprised of about 6 availability zones, which are essentially independent data centers that are physically separate.
Thus for your scenario to take place, you would need each availability zone to have a single point of failure, and at least a team of 6 saboteurs with priviledges access to each of the 6 data centers to work together.
Even so, AWS 101 regarding well architected services states that reliability is achieved by having multiple regional deployments.
I don't have specific numbers, but I think each AZ comprises many data centers. us-east-1 is a very large region, and I don't think any single AZ fits in one building.
That's highly unlikely given the fact that a region like us-east-1 is comprised of about 6 availability zones, which are essentially independent data centers that are physically separate.
Thus for your scenario to take place, you would need each availability zone to have a single point of failure, and at least a team of 6 saboteurs with priviledges access to each of the 6 data centers to work together.
Even so, AWS 101 regarding well architected services states that reliability is achieved by having multiple regional deployments.