Thanks, that is a fair perspective. In our case we're using ELB logs as a redundant trace and it isn't critical that our traffic stops if the access logs fail. It would be nice if this behavior became a toggle in ELB settings, but think we can set something up to disable access logs programatically if we start seeing S3 issues.
Something that wasn't addressed -- there seems to be an architectural issue with ELB where ELBs with S3 access logs enabled had instances fail ELB health checks, presumably while the S3 API was returning 5XX. My load balancers in us-east-1 without access logs enabled were fine throughout this event. Has there been any word on this?