Is Amazon's brain drain to blame for AWS outage yesterday?
What's the story
Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced a major outage yesterday, with its cloud services going down. The issue was first reported at 12:41pm IST when AWS started investigating "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region." An hour later, it confirmed "significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint" in that area. So, why was the issue not resolved fast enough? The exit of senior AWS engineers in recent years might be to blame.
Cause identified
Tracing the problem
AWS engineers had traced the problem back to a DNS resolution issue with the DynamoDB API endpoint for US-EAST-1. This triggered cascading failures across most other services in that region. DynamoDB is a "foundational service" for many other AWS services, meaning an outage here could have far-reaching consequences. The incident affected several internet-based services including banking, gaming, social media platforms, and government operations.
Communication breakdown
Communication issues during the outage
Despite the severity of the situation, AWS's status page initially showed an "all is well!" message. This drew criticism as it took them 75 minutes to go from "things are breaking" to identifying a single service endpoint as the problem. The delay in communication has been noted by many, especially since AWS had previously acknowledged slow outage notification times as an area for improvement.
Staff exodus
Layoffs and their impact
The recent outage has raised questions about the departure of senior AWS engineers with years of institutional knowledge. Justin Garrison, a former AWS employee who left in late 2023, had warned of an increase in Large Scale Events (LSEs) and predicted major outages in 2024. Since then, over 27,000 Amazonians have been impacted by layoffs between 2022 and 2025.
Attrition rates
Employee attrition and discontent
Internal documents have revealed that Amazon suffers from a 69% to 81% regretted attrition across all levels of employment. This means many employees are leaving the company, and their departure is regretted by those who remain. The company's Return to Office initiative has also drawn criticism from senior Amazonians, further highlighting discontent among its workforce.