'You Don't Say': Elon Musk Mocks Amazon, Links AWS Outage To AI Usage In Code-Writing

Elon Musk on Monday, Oct. 20, took a dig at leading tech giant Amazon after Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a global outage for hours with several of its cloud-dependent platforms going out of operations, bringing almost half the internet down. Users across the globe reported outage of services on Amazon Prime Video, Canva, Perplexity AI, and several other platforms which rely on AWS cloud storage and computing empire.

AWS saw widespread outage, which primarily impacted its US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia data centre), starting in the early hours today. This led to increased error rates and latencies across core services like EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and others, causing disruptions to thousands of websites, apps, and platforms that rely on AWS infrastructure.

In a post on 'X' (formerly Twitter), the Tesla CEO mocked Amazon saying, 'You don't say', by reposting a statement of the Amazon AWS CEO where he claimed that artificial intelligence pushes 75% of their production code. The tech billionaire relies widely on AI for driving 'X' and 'Grok' operations.

Earlier, Musk said in a post on 'X Chat' that he does not trust the 'Signal' messaging App. Users widely assumed that Musk's distrust was because the platform relies on AWS computing and digital infrastructure. Notably, the messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker had confirmed on 'X' earlier today that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.

Downdetector reported over 2,000 outage incidents for AWS in the United States, with users flagging problems accessing a wide range of digital services and apps. Amazon’s own ecosystem was not spared. Amazon.com, Prime Video, and Alexa faced connectivity issues, the monitoring site showed. 

Along with these, several apps and websites faced intermittent outages, including Venmo, peer-to-peer payments service operated by PayPal. Digital tools that rely on AWS servers faced outages — including Snapchat, Crunchyroll, Roblox, Whatnot, Rainbow Six Siege, Coinbase, Duolingo, Goodreads, Ring, The New York Times, Life360, Fortnite, Apple TV, Verizon, Chime, McDonald’s App, CollegeBoard, Wordle, and PUBG Battlegrounds.

According to CNN, Amazon says an issue which affected its cloud computing services unit AWS is now “fully mitigated” after being hit by an outage which disrupted several popular websites and apps across the world including Snapchat, Facebook and Fortnite. AWS had cited an “operational issue” affecting “multiple services” and said it was “working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery,” in an update earlier today.

Over 70 of its own services were affected. AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS competes with Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud services.