Amazon Just Proved AI Isn't The Answer Yet Again

You would think they would learn their lesson. But nope!

Photo by Abid Shah on Unsplash

Last week, Amazon showed Kim Kardashian how to actually break the internet (which is still a relevant reference… right?). Thanks to Amazon Web Services completely crapping the bed, everything from major online banking portals to the biggest video games like Fortnite and even some major social media sites went fully offline. And this wasn’t a momentary outage like we are used to, as it took AWS 16 hours to fix the problem. Some reports suggest over 2,000 businesses were impacted by this outage, and, due to its scale and the time it took to resolve, it has cost billions of dollars in lost productivity. So, what happened? Well, it looks like Amazon proved that AI can’t replace workers for the second time!

The official cause of this AWS outage was a DNS resolution issue. But that isn’t the full story, as typically these kinds of issues are relatively easy and quick to fix, especially for an industry leader like AWS. This outage should have been a momentary blip. So, why did it take 16 hours to resolve?

Well, it is painfully apparent to anyone paying attention what has happened: AI turned this issue into a major global event.

Amazon is 100% on the “replace workers with AI” bandwagon. Back in July, Amazon announced it would shrink its workforce as it rolled out generative AI to replace workers. At the same time, at least several hundred workers in the AWS cloud computing unit were laid off. Some reports suggest more than a few hundred were laid off. And now, exactly a week after the incident, Amazon has announced that 30,000 employees, including many at AWS, will be let go and replaced with AI. In short, Amazon is currently undergoing a huge restructuring to implement AI.

But did you catch that?

Just a few months ago, Amazon laid off a significant number of engineers in the AWS unit responsible for resolving outages. That timing is mighty suspicious…

However, we are missing critical context here.

AWS is massively expanding! The same AWS cloud computing which powers all these internet services that crashed is also used to ‘train’ AI. As such, to meet demand, AWS is spending an utterly gargantuan $100 billion on increasing its compute power in 2025 alone! To give you an idea of how huge an investment that is, AWS likely spent $108 billion on infrastructure from 2011 to 2022. Considering how modern infrastructure is more cost-effective, that means this new $100 billion expenditure could more than double AWS’s compute power.

Onboarding and operating that amount of additional computing power also requires onboarding a large, highly educated workforce. But AWS is doing the opposite and has instead been shrinking its workforce!

So, in real terms, AWS is severely understaffed. And you simply cannot bridge this gap by overworking either. AWS has to be replacing workers and filling new positions with AI. Just to be clear, I can’t prove that statement, but it is almost certainly the case.

And that explains why it took so damn long to fix the problem.