cross-region failovers are a thing, but they're expensive to maintain so not everyone does it. I am kinda surprised one region failure had this much impact though

it's us-east-1 that's down, which is the one region with all the AWS services that aren't easy to replicate, like DynamoDB, a major database service used by so so many companies out there. Its an all eggs in one basket kind of scenario. If it was any other region, we'd be fine.