AWS GovCloud East is actually located in Ohio IIRC. Haven't had any issues with GovCloud West today; I'm pretty sure they're logically separated from the commercial cloud.
I don't think this is true anymore. In the early days bad enough outages in us-east-1 would bring down everything because some metadata / control pane stuff was there, I remember getting affected while in other regions, but there's been many years since this has happened.
Today for example no issues. I just avoid us-east-1 and everyone else should to. It's their worst region by far in terms of reliability because they launch all the new stuff there and are always messing it up.
A secondary problem is that a lot of the internal tools are still on US East, so likely the response work is also being impacted by the outage. Been a while since there was a true Sev1 LSE (Large Scale Event).
