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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
When Amazon Web Services suffered an outage on Monday morning, it practically took down the internet with it<\/a>. There went all of Amazon\u2019s services, from its shopping hub to its Ring doorbell cameras. ChatGPT went quiet<\/a>. \u201cSmart\u201d mattresses became unsleepable<\/a>. Video games like Fortnite blinked out<\/a>, as did platforms like Snapchat<\/a> and banking apps<\/a>.<\/p>\n An even greater source of alarm was how long it took to fix the outage. Issues related to the crash were first reported<\/a> at 3:11 AM EST. Three hours later, the AWS dashboard said the underlying issue had been \u201cfully mitigated.\u201d But it wouldn\u2019t be until 6:53 PM that Amazon announced that all its services were returned to \u201cnormal operations.\u201d Over half a day had passed, causing an estimated billions of dollars<\/a> in lost productivity.<\/p>\n The cause was blamed on a DNS resolution issue. DNS, or the Domain Name System, translates URLs like \u201cAmazon.com\u201d into IP addresses, acting as a sort of phonebook \u2014 using a common analogy \u2014 that lets everything connect online. But if the phone numbers are outdated or wrong, then you\u2019re screwed, and you have a resolution issue on your hands.<\/p>\n Amazon has suffered major AWS outages before. But the timing and impact of this one comes just months after an eyebrow-raising personnel decision by the e-commerce giant. In July, its cloud computing unit cut at least hundreds of jobs \u2014 and perhaps more \u2014 following a warning from CEO Andy Jassy that the adoption of generative AI would lead to layoffs.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,\u201d Jassy said in a note to employees in June, per Reuters<\/a>. \u201cWe will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n It remains unclear which roles were affected by the layoffs. But if Amazon is relying on AI to pick up the slack in the wake of the AWS layoffs, it could be a stunning example of how efforts to replace human employees<\/a> with unreliable AI tools and AI agents have backfired.<\/p>\n Technical jobs are some of the most targeted for AI replacement amid the rise of AI coding assistants. Even titans like Google and Microsoft, who can easily afford to pay exorbitant salaries to attract armies\u2019 worth of top talent, are using the tech to get an edge. Twenty-five percent of Google\u2019s new code is written with AI, according to CEO Sundar Pichai<\/a>; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims<\/a> at his company this figure is nearly a third.<\/p>\n While AI may speed up workflows \u2014 and the jury\u2019s still out on that premise<\/a>, with several studies, including ones focused on programming tasks<\/a>, finding that it actually slows them down<\/a> \u2014 one thing it most certainly does not bring to the table is experience.<\/p>\n