AWS Down, AMZN Rose +4.22%. Amazing !

JC888
10-23

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

On Mon, 20 Oct 2025 - AWS - $Amazon.com(AMZN)$ global cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to over 200 services—such as computing, storage, databases, networking, and analytics—enabling individuals, businesses, and governments to build and scale applications without owning physical servers - crashed !.

The Outage.

At around 07:11 GMT on 20 Oct 2025, AWS experienced a massive failure across one of its main data centers in Virginia, its oldest and most critical hub.

The last time, the same site suffered outages were in 2021 and 2020.

Root Cause.

The outage stemmed from a faulty update to the DynamoDB API, which triggered errors in the Domain Name System (DNS)—the mechanism that translates website addresses into IP addresses.

The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System (DNS), that prevented apps from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API - a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data.

The Affected.

Due to AWS global extend, failure cascaded to over 100 AWS services, temporarily downing major apps, both locally and globally.

Notable apps included:

The Recovery.

From first failure to complete recovery, Amazon took approximately 16 hours to fully rectify the outage:

  • According to multiple reports, the outage began around 07:11 GMT (3:11 am ET)

  • Partial recovery signs appeared by 09:22 GMT (5:22 am ET).

  • Full operational restoration was officially confirmed around 22:00 GMT (6:00 pm ET) on the same day.

CEO Comments.

AMZN CEO Andy Jassy did not issue any direct, major public statement immediately after the incident.

Standard comms came from AWS engineers that stated the company had "identified a potential root cause" and was working on "multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery."

Silence from the top level in the immediate aftermath contrasted with US market's relatively calm reaction.

Stock Price.

As of 21 Oct 2025 - endday

What has been amazing though is the stock price. Despite the outage, AMZN shares rose: (see above)

  • By +1.61% on 20 Oct 2025.

  • A further +2.56% on 21 Oct 2025.

AMZN’s modest gains reflected (a) investor confidence in AMZN’s swift recovery and (b) in AWS’s irreplaceable position powering roughly 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market; not to mention the most ‘revenue’ driven amongst all cloud providers. (see below)

The Resilience. Why ?

AMZN's resilience can broadly be attributed to several factors:

  1. Confidence in AWS: Despite the blip, investors maintain high confidence in AWS's long-term dominance & profitability as the world's leading cloud provider. (see above)

  2. Isolated Event Perception: The market generally viewed the outage as a technical operational issue, a DNS error that would be fixed, not an existential threat to Amazon's core business model.

  3. Upcoming Earnings: Investor attention was also focused on AMZN's upcoming quarterly earnings report to be released on Thu, 30 Oct 2025 — with the belief that AWS's overall growth trajectory (a key concern of late) holds more weight than a temporary service failure.

Broader Implication.

The greatest implication of this outage is the stark reality of:

  • The internet's centralization and single point of failure risk.

  • When a single region of one cloud provider (AWS US-EAST-1) can paralyze thousands of applications, financial platforms, smart home devices, and critical services globally.

  • It underscore a growing systemic risk where the internet’s dependence on only a few of cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, & Google. — underscoring the massive concentration of the digital world's infrastructure.

  • It provides a powerful, (albeit a painful) case for (a) a multi-cloud and (b) multi-region strategy, a move toward infrastructure dependency diversification, to prevent a single technical error from becoming a global economic and social catastrophe.

At the same time, AMZN’s rapid resolution and reliable redundancies reinforced its reputation for operational supremacy, turning a potential PR crisis into a testament of resilience. Agree ?

  • Do you think a 16-hours full services recovery is considered “efficient” ? Can it be even faster ?

  • Do you think, AMZN is able to retain its #1 spot and the leading cloud provider ?

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