Blind (and much of mainstream media!): the AWS outage is the result of “mass layoffs, outsourced talent.”
Me: talks to the AWS engineers handling the incident. Turns out the creators of the systems impacted were in the call (not laid off!), no outsourcing etc
Will share more
A massive AWS outage broke the internet this morning — taking down everything from Fortnite and Snapchat to Starbucks mobile orders and Ring cameras.
On Blind, engineers say the crash was a long time coming — the result of mass layoffs, outsourced talent, and poor leadership.
“If you constantly fire people who make mistakes, you’re just left with people who haven’t learned anything and are waiting for their turn to screw up.”
— Verified Amazon Employee
“Constant layoffs have consequences.”
— Verified Zapier Employee
Was this just bad timing — or the inevitable result of years of cost-cutting and leadership decay?
Share your thoughts below. Read the full story on Blind
Be careful what sources you trust. Anonymous sources + those speculating frequently have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to software engineering… same with much of mainstream media
I’m writing up new details not shared before for Tuesday’s @Pragmatic_Eng
Nov 5, 2025 · 9:17 AM UTC
And operating massive distributed systems remains very hard. I’m impressed with what I learned about how the AWS team goes about both aiming to avoid incidents like this, but also handling them and (most importantly) learning from them.
Eg notice how US-East-1 going down didn’t take down other regions, like last time? Well: this was thanks to learning from that outage!
