Amazon Web Services experienced several service problems at one of its east coast datacenters, impacting major sites across the Internet, but Twilio's APIs and services were not affected. The company's experience highlights the importance of solid distributed architectural design when building cloud services, with key principles including unit-of-failure, short timeouts and quick retries, idempotent service interfaces, small stateless services, and relaxing consistency requirements. By following these best practices, developers can minimize the impact of occasional issues in underlying infrastructure, ensure high availability and performance, and build scalable systems that can handle failures and retries without locking up or consuming resources.