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.
If netflix is down, then it's something most companies who know how to design fail over can't cope with.