"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.
The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
> It is a fact that there have been 27,000+ Amazonians impacted by layoffs between 2022 and 2024, continuing into 2025. It's hard to know how many of these were AWS versus other parts of its Amazon parent, because the company is notoriously tight-lipped about staffing issues.
Internal documents reportedly say that Amazon suffers from 69 percent to 81 percent regretted attrition across all employment levels. In other words, "people quitting who we wish didn't."
The internet is full of anecdata of senior Amazonians lamenting the hamfisted approach of their Return to Office initiative; experts have weighed in citing similar concerns.
So the title is all speculation. The author put 2 and 2 together and concluded that 10 is greater than 9.
Speaking of DNS, I still cannot comprehend why we still rely on the current complex, aging, centralized, rent-seeking DNS.
It's one one of the few parts of the internet which could potentially be replaced over time with very little disruption.
The hierarchy of resolvers could be replaced with a far simpler flat hierarchy Blockchain where people could buy and permanently own their domains directly on-chain... No recurring fees. People could host websites on the Blockchain from beyond the grave... This is kind of a dream of mine. Not possible to achieve in our current system.
internal reports from current AWS engineers seem to be confirming all of the speculation in this article. Shit's rotten from the inside out and you can pretty evenly blame AI, brain drain, and good old fashioned "big company politics"
There's been a massive talent exodus, especially among the principal and senior principal engineering roles, across all Amazon orgs since the RTO policies have been enforced. Its demoralizing to lose key engineers that you look up to and want to continue to learn from all because a few people far removed from the day to day make a bad call.
RTO in combination with Amazon being last place in AI innovation have led to departures of anyone that can leave, leaving.
> So they can't suggest a fix even if they know 100% what it will be. Thats exactly what happened this time. EIGHT different staff members pointed to the underlying cause and were told (some literally) to "shut the f*ck up and get back to your job"
Jesus, if even an ounce of that is true... Yes, everyone on the internet is a cat clawing on a keyboard... but if a ton of people legitimately confirmed to be ex-AWS point to similar culture issues... probably it's AWS that's rotting.
This is the time to accept that the path forward is keeping people and giving them the best tools you possibly can to do their work. That is, the same as has been true for decades remains so.
Yes, development tools are better every day. Yes, you can downsize. No it won’t be felt immediately. Yes, it mortgages the future and at a painfully high interest rate.
Suspending disbelief won’t make downsizing work better.
Seems like it worked fine. They laid off a quarter of their junior principal engineers, the stock went up. They had a massive outage a few months later, the stock went up again. Everything's working out fine for their strategy so far.
It was certainly suspicious that actual progress on the outage seemed to start right around U.S. west coast start of day. Updates before that were largely generic "we're monitoring and mitigating" with nothing of substance.
I noticed that too. I think tech culture has to change a bit. Silicon Valley is a great location if you're making hardware or prepackaged software. If you have to support a real economy that is mostly on the East Coast you need a presence there.
This is how articles should be written, this is why I’m reading El Reg (a.k.a. The Register) all these decades, this is what happens when high management cares only about profits and when real engineers don’t eat the RTO bullshit. Bravo for putting this online.
P.S. I’m not an Amazon hater, replace the company name with any other big one of your choice and the article will have the same meaning ;-)
It's not your feeling about Amazon that would cast doubt on your take, it's that you've reduced it to one pet cause and decided a source is well written because it appeals to your dislike of RTO. Nowhere has any evidence of the relevance of that to this been presented, Amazon has had outages since before WFH even began, they've all always had their occasional outages and bad days.
The Register is an opinionated tech tabloid filled with outrage bait. This article is not an exception, drawing far reaching conclusions from little evidence.
Given today is Diwali, perhaps the reason everything went down is because the best and brightest from India were all on vacation and weren't there to babysit/roll back the deployment that broke everything?
This fails to recognize that the people who designed everything to rely on us east 1 did so a long time ago. "Brain drain" could just mean that they've had their fun and now want other people to deal with their mess.
>I've seen zero signs that this stems from a lack of transparency, and every indication that they legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time.
That information is under NDA, so it's only natural you aren't privy to it.
I once saw a layoff that was followed by a week long outage because no one remaining knew how to deploy to prod, and no one knew how to recover after the failed deployment. I felt bad for the people remaining who had to go through that,but it was hilarious.
> one really gets the sense that it took them 75 minutes to go from "things are breaking" to "we've narrowed it down to a single service endpoint, but are still researching," which is something of a bitter pill to swallow
Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time? I don't do my day-job in webdev, so maybe I'm just naive. But being able to diagnose the single service endpoint in 75 minutes seems pretty good to me. When I worked on firmware we frequently spent _weeks_ trying to diagnose what part of the firmware was broken.
Between the engineering staff and the warehouse workers, I wonder how long it will be until they have already fired everyone who ever would have been willing to work there.
Even with candidate pools of hundreds of thousands of H1-B engineers and tens of millions of illegal immigrant warehouse workers, there still comes a point where such a big company firing so many people so quickly exhausts all their options.
It reminds me of the Robot Chicken Sketch where Imperial Officers aboard the Death Star all pretend to be force choked to death by Darth Vader so they can avoid getting killed by lightsaber, then come back in under different names in different jobs. It's worse though for Amazon: nobody wants to come back.
Ehh I trust the reporting and generally agree that RTO was/is executed hamfisted but I dunno if this particular incident "makes" the narrative. IIRC LSE rate has been increasing for many years, maybe most of AWS's existence. This is part and parcel of building something so complex that continues to grow and evolve.
I do expect much better of them and they certainly have problems to solve but this is a big company evolution thing and not an Amazon-specific thing imo.
One of the best-written articles I've read in a long time. I wish general news coverage had this tight blend of fact, context, and long-term perspective.
Garbage reporting:
1. AWS had an outage
2. AWS has lost a lot of employees
Conclusion:
The brain drain lead to the outage...
I need an LLM trained explicitly on folks confusing correlation and causation and put a big old red dot in my address bar.
I love that there's a whole section "The talent drain evidence" trying to defend their journalistic integrity, but they then go on to totally face plant.
75 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadThe companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”
- Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview
So the title is all speculation. The author put 2 and 2 together and concluded that 10 is greater than 9.
Worthless article.
It's one one of the few parts of the internet which could potentially be replaced over time with very little disruption.
The hierarchy of resolvers could be replaced with a far simpler flat hierarchy Blockchain where people could buy and permanently own their domains directly on-chain... No recurring fees. People could host websites on the Blockchain from beyond the grave... This is kind of a dream of mine. Not possible to achieve in our current system.
- simple
- battle hardened
- distributed
- affordable
blockchains are:
- essoteric, backwards, and not easily implemented
- new and unproven, frequently hacked
- effectively a ploy to centralize / redo Web 1.0 but owned by one blockchain
- ...waaaaaaay more about money and "owning something" than DNS is.
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/10/20/aws_outa...
RTO in combination with Amazon being last place in AI innovation have led to departures of anyone that can leave, leaving.
Jesus, if even an ounce of that is true... Yes, everyone on the internet is a cat clawing on a keyboard... but if a ton of people legitimately confirmed to be ex-AWS point to similar culture issues... probably it's AWS that's rotting.
Yes, development tools are better every day. Yes, you can downsize. No it won’t be felt immediately. Yes, it mortgages the future and at a painfully high interest rate.
Suspending disbelief won’t make downsizing work better.
Are they?
P.S. I’m not an Amazon hater, replace the company name with any other big one of your choice and the article will have the same meaning ;-)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/1ncm25p/amazon_m...
I’m confused how they can have such a failure, they are employing the best and brightest top tier talent from India.
Hopefully they can increase their H1B allotment even more next year to help prevent these types of failures.
[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/10/20/aws_outa...
>I've seen zero signs that this stems from a lack of transparency, and every indication that they legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time.
That information is under NDA, so it's only natural you aren't privy to it.
They’ll get acquired and top people leave as their stock vests or get pushed out because the megacorp wants someone different in the seat.
The people who knew the tech are gone and you’re left with an unmaintainable mess that becomes unreliable and no one knows how to fix it.
Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time? I don't do my day-job in webdev, so maybe I'm just naive. But being able to diagnose the single service endpoint in 75 minutes seems pretty good to me. When I worked on firmware we frequently spent _weeks_ trying to diagnose what part of the firmware was broken.
Even with candidate pools of hundreds of thousands of H1-B engineers and tens of millions of illegal immigrant warehouse workers, there still comes a point where such a big company firing so many people so quickly exhausts all their options.
It reminds me of the Robot Chicken Sketch where Imperial Officers aboard the Death Star all pretend to be force choked to death by Darth Vader so they can avoid getting killed by lightsaber, then come back in under different names in different jobs. It's worse though for Amazon: nobody wants to come back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFihTRIxCkg
I do expect much better of them and they certainly have problems to solve but this is a big company evolution thing and not an Amazon-specific thing imo.
Conclusion: The brain drain lead to the outage...
I need an LLM trained explicitly on folks confusing correlation and causation and put a big old red dot in my address bar.
I love that there's a whole section "The talent drain evidence" trying to defend their journalistic integrity, but they then go on to totally face plant.