NEED TO KNOW
- Outage traced to “employee optimization” gone too far.
- Executives confirmed AI is “working on it” but mostly “self-reflecting.”
- Customers urged to remain calm, shop Walmart until further notice.
SEATTLE, WA — Amazon experienced widespread outages Friday after reportedly laying off the only engineer who still remembered how to reboot the company’s global servers. The outage began just hours after the company announced another round of mass layoffs affecting up to 30,000 employees.
According to internal sources, the final engineer, known only as “Steve from Cloud,” received his termination email moments before a routine system update spiraled into chaos. Within minutes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Prime Video, Alexa, and Jeff Bezos’ space Wi-Fi were all down. “We thought AI had it covered,” said an exhausted executive. “Turns out the AI was trained by Steve.”
AI Takes Over, Immediately Panics
Amazon’s new AI workforce, implemented earlier this year to reduce costs and human emotions, struggled to diagnose the outage. “It’s trying to process feelings of guilt,” one developer said. “We didn’t program it for that.”
Meanwhile, Alexa devices across the country began screaming “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO” before shutting down entirely. Prime delivery drones were seen hovering aimlessly above residential neighborhoods, dropping random packages marked “Reboot Protocols.”
Leadership Responds Swiftly With Vague Emails
CEO Andy Jassy reassured customers in an all-hands memo sent from his yacht’s emergency hotspot. “We remain committed to innovation and customer obsession,” the message read, “and we’re confident that everything will eventually fix itself.”
In a follow-up, Jassy hinted that AI might “learn from this” once Amazon’s data centers are back online, “assuming anyone remembers where they are.”
At press time, the company had re-posted Steve’s former job listing under the title Cloud Reliability Coordinator II (Unpaid Internship) and was reportedly considering using ChatGPT to write his reference letter.
We were one password away from stability, but HR deleted it.
Lana Ortiz, Former AWS Engineer
