You know that if US East suffers a FULL data loss that the recovery would take weeks with the question if it would even be possible. That's what happened to ovh... it wasn't just one building.
> It's not like there is a mirror datacenter just two blocks away
Isn't that exactly what Availability Zones are for? They're physically separate[0] datacenters and each one contains a copy of each S3 object (unless using the explicit single-zone options)
It's also straightforward (although not necessarily that cheap) to replicate S3 objects to another region
If us-east-1 ever suffered a “FULL” data loss, it would be a company-ending event for so many companies that it would practically end society as we know it.
OVH’s failure was a single building. That’s the problem with a lot of server hosters - even Google has their availability zones all co-located in the same building, so a physical event like a fire could take down an entire region. AWS has AZs in physically separate locations, each with 1+ separate DCs.