So you’ve likely heard about Amazon Web Services (AWS) going offline a couple of days ago, crashing thousands of platforms from all kinds of industries, including Snapchat, the McDonald’s app, Roblox, and Fortnite, because of an “operational issue.”

The servers are back up, but it was discovered that an interesting report had been published right before the outage, alleging that the company had laid off 40% of its DevOps team to replace them with AI. The author says that there was “an email memo, which was briefly posted on the internal wiki before being taken down, blamed the cuts on strategic automation initiatives.”

It reports that the AI detects and fixes IAM permission errors instantly, rebuilds broken VPC or subnet configs, and rolls back failed Lambda deployments without human input.

Now, there is a lot of skepticism around this article, and you should take it with a huge grain of salt, but the timing is curious, although we do not claim it is true or is somehow connected to the systems’ crash.

The latest official layoff news we have is Amazon firing hundreds of people at AWS in July.

Whether it’s AI that broke the servers or not, the fact that so many companies suffered from it must mean we need more providers of cloud services. Last year, the same happened because of a Windows glitch, which caused TV channels, airlines, banks, and many other industries to freeze for a while.

So, should there be another option? And do you believe that Amazon cut 40% of its DevOps jobs? Join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.