Not necessarily: they could terminate the initial connection close to the user and then run a new connection. While this sounds like it shouldn't help, because the second connection is fully under their control they can make it highly reliable and very fast. Additionally, any recovery from dropped packets (on the user's home network) only has the latency of an in-region connection.

This also sets them up for ruining a light cache in-region, and potentially scaling that up to handle more kinds of API calls.