When a single realm is down

No it isnt.

CRZ spins up copies of individual zones, which are then shared between servers.

Sharding makes a duplicate of the entire world server (all zones), and is restricted to one server.

Sharding has actually never been used on the live game, and was created solely for Classic.

Its almost like they did an interview about this very thing and explained exactly how it works.

Oh yeah, they did.