You are absolutely correct. The odds of all of the company's data centers being simultaneously destroyed by meteors are far more likely than 11 9s. It's complete marketing fluff that is not targeted at engineers.
Presumably Amazon made it up because people kept asking them "how likely are you to lose my data?" and Amazon needed to be able to say something other than "it's impossible to say due to human factors being the dominant likely cause but it's very unlikely."
Presumably Amazon made it up because people kept asking them "how likely are you to lose my data?" and Amazon needed to be able to say something other than "it's impossible to say due to human factors being the dominant likely cause but it's very unlikely."