Core Viewpoint - On October 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage that affected numerous well-known websites and applications globally, raising concerns about the reliability of cloud services [1][7]. Group 1: Incident Details - The outage began in the US-EAST-1 region (Northern Virginia) and started reporting issues shortly after 3 AM Eastern Time [1]. - Affected services included Amazon's own e-commerce platform, Snapchat, Robinhood, Venmo, Coinbase, and others that rely on AWS [3]. - AWS identified the root cause of the issue as a DNS resolution anomaly affecting the DynamoDB service in the US-EAST-1 region [4]. Group 2: Financial Implications - AWS is a crucial part of Amazon's business, generating $107.6 billion in revenue for 2024, accounting for 17% of Amazon's total revenue, with an operating profit of $39.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of approximately 62% [7]. - In Q2, AWS revenue reached $30.9 billion, growing 17.5% year-on-year, but this growth rate lagged behind competitors like Microsoft Azure (39%) and Google Cloud (32%), raising concerns about AWS's market leadership [7]. - The outage occurred just before the release of AWS's Q3 financial report on October 30, which may lead investors to reassess the reliability of the cloud service business [7].