Staff at Amazon are still reeling from a fresh round of layoffs that saw thousands of corporate workers lose their job as execs appeared to sacrifice employees for their topline. In a memo to all Amazon workers, Beth Galetti, the company’s senior vice president of HR, bragged that “some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well.”
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti beamed.
Mileage may vary. The layoffs from earlier this week came hot on the heels of an unprecedented Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that took out a major chunk of the world internet, from Snapchat to ChatGPT. Early financial loss estimates say the damages from that could amount to over half a billion dollars when all the dust settles.
Those bad optics were compounded by prior rounds of layoffs over the summer, specifically in AWS’s cloud computing unit, which lost hundreds of employees. In July, AWS CEO Andy Jassy enthused that “generative AI and agents” were changing “the way work is done” in the company’s internet services division — though it remains to be seen if the tech is truly up for the task.
After that drama, many online seem to be connecting new outages to AWS. Case in point, today thousands of users on Downdetector started reporting what they said was another AWS outage that they said was affecting services across the web.
Amazon disputed the outage reports, though — and suggested that users were unfairly blaming it for an actual outage at Microsoft’s Azure.
“There are no issues with AWS services, and all AWS services are operating normally,” it wrote on a status page. “We are aware that an operational issue at another infrastructure provider may be impacting some customers’ applications and networks.”
That claim was corroborated by Tom’s Guide, which had initially reported that there had in fact been a new AWS outage.
“Once Azure flipped the wrong central switch, it disrupted services that also use AWS in its components, but the problem wasn’t AWS itself,” it wrote in a postmortem.
The lesson for Amazon is clear, though: successive waves of layoffs as leadership sings the praises of AI to replace workers make AWS an easy target when things break online.
“Either way,” Tom’s wrote in its initial coverage, “for people who rely on Azure- or AWS-backed services, it probably doesn’t matter which one is causing the problem — all that matters is they can’t do what they need to.”
Updated to include postmortem coverage of the outage and to remove references to impacted services that weren’t established.
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