QSK,
I don't remember the Virgin Cairns incident. Failure of the Cairns ILS will be passed to aircraft within 1 hours flight time at time of failure. When the NOTAM is issued advising ILS not available, the NOTAM will be issued to those within 1 hours flight time when NOTAM is received by ATC. Aircraft outside the 1 hour is responsibility of company or pilot We regularly pass info to aircraft more than 1 hour away - I tend to add 30 mins to it.
I don't know if failure of AWIS is NOTAMed, but AERIS is certainly NOTAMed.
We occasionally get queried by pilots as to why they didn't receive amended TAF or TTF. I don't remember any queries where the aircraft concerned was within 1 hour.
We recently had a query from a QF pilot as to why the ATIS being received by ACARS was 2 or 3 issues out of date. Turns out there was a problem with QF ACARS. Do pilots get informed of ACARS issues so pilots will look elsewhere for operational information or do the companies use alternative routing to pass operational information?