no, not a major portiin of the internet, only matrix.org, which is relatively little (veryveryvery little) compared to us-east-1 going down. No, things did not still work, that's simply not true. It's nice you&your friend have HSs. Could you administrate 69,999,998 more please, for the non-techy folks, in a reliability somewhere close to that of signal or matrix.org?
I'm sorry, a pair of homeservers to enable friends to communicate: not even the same problem class