One difference might be that when you self-host, you are more sensitive of some of the risks, whereas a hosting service might be balancing that risk with a need to scale, and their appetite for risk and tradeoff considerations might be different from yours. It might be that these companies know something that their customers don't, and thus are more willing to take on risks.

In this case, it seems like the company took a risk and it did not go well. The possibility of being able to restore from backups might have been factored into this risk, but the latency of doing so might not have been.