You're not a technical person, but a journalism major.
What went out was San Diego.
You pass through San Diego to log into ALL servers, but after that point some servers are hosted out of San Diego, but some out of Seattle.
The connectivity to Seattle was never broken.
Unless you all actively instructed the Seattle data center to shut down, those servers remained up.
The only conceivable way that people playing on servers hosted out of Seattle were unable to stay on is if Seattle must communicate with San Diego in order to function. If that is the case, then you have major network / global game design issues, as you have no redundancy. If one data center goes poof, the other should be able to remain functional. If it doesn't, then that's a Single Point of Failure, and is a bad design for any type of system that is supposed to have high availability to a global market.
Of course, the centralized login server farm hosted in San Diego with no redundant login farm somewhere else is a bad design as well...but I'm tending to think more along the lines of large enterprise operations, like Amazon or Wal-Mart, where they'd focus on redundancy more than you all would.



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