This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
TLDR:
report had been published right before the outage, alleging that the company had laid off 40% of its DevOps team to replace them with AI. ... there is a lot of skepticism around this article... although we do not claim it is true or is somehow connected to the systems' crash.
Super-Duper-short-version:
No trustworthy data about the incident.
To be fair, this is 2025, there's no trustworthy data about anything any more.
Hell, you might just be an AI. Or I might just be an AI. Or maybe there wasn't even an outage. I didn't notice any issues, so maybe AI hallucinated it, or it's been made up as clickbait and been second-hand reported by thousands of news sites that don't care about fact checking any more.
Not that there are facts any more, anyway.
Amazon is laying off or has lost truly staggering numbers of experienced staff.
So it might not be AI, although my experience with AI suggests it's right about 60% of the time and there's no way I would let it implement it's own recommendations anywhere near anything that earned me money.
It might just be cheaper, younger, newer staff making mistakes they don't know how to fix.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
More likely their hamfisted return to work layoff scheme has caused them to bleed experienced staff. The only people left are less experienced and give less of a shit. It took them over an hour to realize the database of their DNS system was the issue.
I asked a buddy that works at Amazon about the outage and he pointed me to this article.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
I know quite a few people who currently work there and pretty much all of them are trying to leave.
This is a really good article. Thanks for posting it.
I wonder how long AI will function when it starts feeding on AI generated junk data. Like a photocopy of a photocopy.
This report is a blog linking to a blog.
Thanks I didnt see that. Ill add it to the description.
I really want this to be true, because not only I believe that would be the immediate outcome, but also because it would be hilarious.
But a somewhat credible source that's not wrapped in "allegedly" and old stories would really help drive the point home.
I know there's doubt as to the validity of the claims. I only want to say this: when "AI" takes jobs, who is there to plug things in to make the "AI" machine go?
Sounds like Amazon fucked around and found out.... Allegedly.
A handful of senior engineers or developers. And then we're even more ducked when they retire or die, because the no-one is hiring junior engineers or developers
What a great idea to test this on paying customers' live production websites.
I'd believe them if they said they tested small- scale locally. Even good software/designs can implode when they get scaled up, and I doubt this was good design or software.
Absolute fucking MORONS have taken over the world, and are wrecking it.
IF we ever get our country back, we have to go forward with a national strategy that we no longer have to be polite to treasonous MAGA scumbags. Everytime they open their mouths they should be shouted down with screams to shut the fuck up.
We should never have to tolerate the opinions of stupid, violent traitors.
They'll all pretend they were never MAGA, why are you still going on about Trump, we're trying to look forward, etc.
This is exactly how the GOP disowned the Bush II Administration with the Tea Party.
And that's when we have to scream the loudest, and absolutely refuse to give their gaslighting any credibility at all. If you were a Republican during this era, then you are a MAGA Traitor, racist, rapist, incompetent, intolerant, violent, stupid, pedophile.
And you ALWAYS will be, forever.
MBAs are mortal enemies of software engineers. Couple that with what one former CEO of mine said: "engineers have very well tuned bullshit detectors" and you arrive at the problem...
This happens with any disruptive tech. In the 80s, Old white CEOs were computerizing everything without understanding computers. 2025 every grey CEO throws around A1 without having the first clue how it works.
I doubt it. Even the article claims that there's been no news about layoffs since July. No mentions from laid off engineers online either.
July isn't "days before", unless you're really stretching "days"
Days before the Queen of England died, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? (Literally no, but I sure could speculate).
Ah yes trustworthy source 80.lv
Look into this source for like 2 seconds, it is a marketing research company, not journalists, with extremely suspicious and likely generated team. https://80.lv/contact-us#audience https://my.linkedin.com/in/arti-sergeev the "Head" of 80 level doesn't even seem like a real person, definitely not a real picture.
So you’re saying the 80.lv “team” are AI generated? Wouldn’t that be ironic…AI making shit up about AI.
The execs started buying into their own bullshit…
"the only winning move is not to play"
Amazon has laid off or scared off the vast majority of their most experienced people. Those that weren’t laid off quit over stupidity like “RTO”. I don’t doubt that their underpaid junior staff and Kool-Aid drinking upper management decided that AI is a great way to replace all the lost knowledge and expertise. As with the downfall of civilization, this will get much worse before it gets better. It will be interesting to see how huge companies react to another companies enshittification actively damaging their business and reputation.
Yeah I don't trust the source, but I've heard a ton of articles saying they've been replacing people with AI.
We cannot have the internet be centralized on central hardware with so little oversight.
The thing is that Amazon needs to get broken up way more than Ma Bell did. Most people have never heard of AWS before, but it's crazy to have one company own so much of the internet, even before you get into their stranglehold on internet commerce (which also should be broken up).
Why am I not surprised...
I've been waiting for something like this so we can see who's heads roll when AI fucks up. I figured we'd see doctors and lawyers losing their licenses first, but maybe it'll be this. So, who shoulders the blame when a program that can't learn from its mistakes fucks up a quarter of the internet?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/ai-amazon-workforce-jassy.html
It's not tough to see what led to this crash. Occam's razor is pretty clear on this one.
Is there 404 reporting on this yet?
Probably why it crashed then
I wish they'd replace the executives first.
