You only think it's soft because nothing in your life relies on it. For the companies who were hosted there it was a pretty big deal.

Imagine the chaos that a strike on us-east-1 would cause. Failover management for all of AWS is centrally located in Virginia, redundancies would not activate.

A lot of commerce would come to a grinding halt. Many banks and credit exchanges would just stop working for weeks, to say nothing for the plethora of businesses who do not have redundant systems.

I think "soft target" means it doesn't have a lot of military defenses, not that it's unimportant.