Experts say outages like the one that Amazon experienced this week are almost inevitable given the complexity and scale of cloud technology—but the duration serves as a warning.

Debate whether companies have become too dependent on AWS and its peers, especially when virtually all the in-demand AI services we're banking on are hosted in these clouds. Play another game of Faker or Breaker with three companies impacted by the AWS outage.

AWS outage from DNS, EC2 and DynamoDB issues explained as cloud infrastructure at data centers and potentially AI technology played a role as Amazon invests in AI.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is a cloud computing service run by Amazon. It reported issues early in the morning on Oct. 20 in one of its data centers. AWS said it fixed the problem by 6 a.m. Eastern Time, but ripple effects caused disruptions all day, with most services not returning to normal until well after the school day ended.

Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were some of the affected apps and websites, among a host of big names. AWS offers cloud servers that allow these services, and millions of other websites and platforms, to run. AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet.

The outage affected websites like Coinbase and Fortnite, and disrupted services like Signal, Zoom, and Amazon's own products, including Ring.

Some of the top stories Wall Street is watching on Monday, Oct. 20, include an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage impacting many major websites. Futures (ES=F, NQ=F, YM=F) are rising ahead of a big week of earnings,

That means AI-native apps have double exposure to the risks around a limited number of providers for critical, centralized resources. For AI-native apps, it’s like the mainframe era squared. If the generative AI platform fails, everything built on it fails. And if the cloud that hosts the AI platform fails, it all goes down, too.