But the outages have been getting worse and worse even before anything related to AI took off.

The issue is that they're not a scrappy startup anymore, they are defacto running the internets development infrastructure and are owned by a trillion dollar company.

So the bar they're measured by has changed and they haven't even tried to keep up, paying lip service to reliability when you are critical infrastructure is not going to go well.

There were reliability issues in 2010 for sure, but it feels worse now; the period before acquisition was the most stable (2014-2017).