The last Netflix post mortem mentioned they had a bug in their configuration where they kept sending traffic to already down ELB instances, which was the cause of the last outage for them if I remember correctly.
Not necessarily, it could be some element of the Netflix architecture that due to their size and/or design trade-offs has taken longer / is harder to eliminate than it would be for others.
Other services, like Twilio, have come through several of these major problems with US-EAST generally unscathed while Netflix has had issues repeatedly.
According to a site which doesn't document what its reports are based on. Given that Netflix worked for me during that period, I'm suspicious that downrightnow might be using EBS somewhere.
