Wait, Google and Microsoft rely on AWS? That seems unlikely? (does it? I wouldn't really know to be honest)

In terms of user reports: Some users don't know what the hell is going on. This is a constant.

For instance: When there's a widespread Verizon cellular outage, sites like downdetector will show a spike in Verizon reports.

But such sites will also show a spike in AT&T and T-Mobile reports. Even though those latter networks are completely unaffected by Verizon's back-end issues, the graphs of user reports are consistently shaped the same for all 3 carriers.

This is just because some of the users doing the reporting have no clue.

So when the observation is "AWS is in outage and people are reporting issues at Google, and Microsoft," then the last two are often just factors of people being people and reporting the wrong thing.

(You're hanging out on HN, so there's very good certainty that you know what precisely what cell carrier you're using and also can discern the difference betwixt an Amazon, a Google, and a Microsoft. But lots of other people are not particularly adept at making these distinctions. It's normal and expected for some of them to be this way at all times.)

Thats true. And big part of the reason is the user‘s browser. They use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome and can‘t open a page and there are weird error messages? oh, thats probably a Google issue…

More likely the outage reports for google and microsoft are based around systems which also include aws

It’s very likely they’ve bought companies that were built on AWS and haven’t migrated to use their homegrown cloud platforms.

They might be using third party services that rely on AWS.