Elon Musk took a sharp dig at Amazon after a major AWS outage on Monday, Oct. 20, knocked out several cloud-dependent platforms for hours; temporarily bringing nearly half the internet to a halt.
Services including Amazon Prime Video, Canva, Perplexity AI, and several others relying on Amazon Web Services faced downtime, frustrating millions of users worldwide.
Musk posted a sarcastic “You don’t say” on X (formerly Twitter) in response to a resurfaced statement from the AWS CEO, where he had claimed that 75% of Amazon’s production code is now AI-generated.
Musk had earlier expressed distrust in Signal, the encrypted messaging app, which happens to depend on AWS servers.
Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker confirmed on X that their platform was also impacted by the outage.
According to Downdetector, there were over 2,000 outage reports in the U.S. alone. Amazon’s own ecosystem wasn’t spared either; Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa all suffered connectivity issues.
The disruption also hit major platforms like Venmo, Snapchat, Roblox, Crunchyroll, Coinbase, Canva, Duolingo, Goodreads, Ring, and more.
Amazon later confirmed that the issue, which affected its cloud computing arm, had been “fully mitigated”.
The company cited an “operational issue” that impacted multiple services, adding it was working on “multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery.”
AWS; which provides on-demand computing power, data storage, and other digital infrastructure to companies, governments, and individuals; is one of the backbone services of the global internet.
A disruption of this scale can ripple through multiple industries, given its dominant role in global cloud infrastructure, competing directly with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.