Zane:
Have you read Dfinity’s official statement? It’s literally above the statement you quoted, as they currently intend to implement the system, unless you use a VPN, if there aren’t nodes serving the canister in your proximity you won’t be able to access it.
The IC itself was actually performing as expected and was not down, however one of the Boundary Nodes (in US-east) which acts as a gateway for the IC experienced intermittent issues that prevented failover. As such users in that geo-area who were DNS routed to that impacted boundary node experienced their requests being dropped by the BN.
Advanced users in the impacted area were technically able to reach the IC by talking to other boundary nodes. The method of targeting specific boundary nodes …
Apparently there are ways to do it if you needed to, they just havent abstracted away regional node fallback for some reason. It’s probably just a configuration they can change anytime if they wanted or is necessary. Kind of a non issue to me.