Even though us-east-1 is the region geographically closest to me, I always choose another region as default due to us-east-1 (seemingly) being more prone to these outages.
Obviously, some services are only available in us-east-1, but many applications can gain some resiliency just by making a primary home in any other region.
This is the right move. 10 years ago, us-east-1 was on the order of 10x bigger than the next largest region. This got a little better now, but any scaling issues still tend to happen in us-east-1.
The AWS has been steering people to us-east-2 for a while. For example, traffic between us-east-1 and us-east-2 has the same cost as inter-AZ traffic within the us-east-1.
> There is one IAM control plane for all commercial AWS Regions, which is located in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. The IAM system then propagates configuration changes to the IAM data planes in every enabled AWS Region. The IAM data plane is essentially a read-only replica of the IAM control plane configuration data.
and I believe some global services (like certificate manager, etc.) also depend on the us-east-1 region
Obviously, some services are only available in us-east-1, but many applications can gain some resiliency just by making a primary home in any other region.