> And he is making a mistake in claiming the partitions are "exceedingly rare". Again he is not thinking about a global distributed cloud across continents.

Any time an AWS region or AZ goes down we see a lot of popular services go nearly-completely-down. And it's generally fine.

One thing I appreciate about AWS is that (operating "live" in just a single AZ or even single region) I've seen far fewer partition-causing networking hiccups than when my coworkers and I were responsible for wiring and tuning our own networks for our own hardware in datacenters.