Were you affected by Monday’s AWS outage? Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing service, went down for over 12 hours, and took a big chunk of the Internet with it. “The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work,” Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, said in a statement to CNN. “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed—from airlines to factories.”
Outages happen for all sorts of reasons, but Futurism puts forth a particular argument about what might have influenced this major disruption. In a new piece, the outlet notes that hundreds of workers were laid off in July, shortly after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy communicated to staff that “Generative AI and agents” would indeed take on roles that were previously performed by humans. Futurism ties this specifically to the fact that it took so long to identify and fix the problem.
This argument is supported by writer Corey Quinn for The Register. Quinn theorizes that the slip-up indicates a lack of institutional knowledge; he reports that there has been an exodus of senior engineers at AWS, and those left don’t know the intricacies of keeping things running smoothly. (In addition to layoffs, Quinn cites high attrition rates and a negative reaction to the company’s return to office policy among the reasons Amazon is lacking talent right now.)
The outage lays bare a lot of problems, not just the fact that AI-prompted layoffs could have prompted or at least exacerbated the issue. “Monday’s outage briefly blocked some people from scheduling doctor’s appointments and accessing banking services. But what if an outage took down the AI tools that doctors were using to help diagnose patients, or that companies used to help facilitate financial transactions?” Clare Duffy wonders over at CNN. “The risk of serious disruption from an outage rises considerably the more companies rely on AI agents to do critical tasks and automate the work of humans, a transition that’s already in progress despite disagreement about just how far it will go.” Welcome to the future!
