Amazon said on Tuesday that it plans to reduce its corporate workforce by 14,000 jobs as it seeks to reduce bureaucracy, remove layers and invest more in its AI strategy.

“It is here, it is real, it is happening,” said play-by-play announcer Ian Eagle. “The NBA on Prime.”

And with that, Amazon’s foray into live streaming NBA games tipped off.

Amazon marked a major milestone with its growing sports portfolio on Friday, broadcasting its first-ever live NBA game around the world. The matchup — Celtics vs. Knicks — was part of an 11-year deal that gives Amazon exclusive rights to select regular season and playoff games.

We watched the game via Prime Video — accessible with a $139/year Prime subscription — and came away impressed.

The stream ran seamlessly across Fire TV, iPhone, and MacBook. The quality was crisp, load times near-instant, and there wasn’t a hint of lag — at least on a home WiFi connection. Amazon’s 1080p HDR video and 5.1 surround sound were a slam dunk.

The broadcast looked and felt like a traditional national telecast. The graphics mirrored what fans expect from ESPN or TNT, the commentary came from familiar voices — Eagle and Stan Van Gundy — and the pregame show from featured a slick set with former NBA stars at Amazon MGM Studios.

But under the surface, Amazon quietly tested a new frontier: in-stream sports betting.

The most noticeable new feature was the FanDuel integration, Amazon’s latest experiment in blending live sports and interactive technology.

Fans watching on Fire TV could log into their FanDuel accounts through Prime Video to view real-time betting information and track wagers directly within the broadcast.

You can’t make actual bets on Prime Video — not yet, at least— but it marks a subtle yet significant shift in how live sports may evolve on streaming platforms.

And it comes at a fascinating moment: the NBA is dealing with a major betting scandal that made headlines this week and involves the FBI.

I was surprised when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver joined the broadcast for a live interview. Sideline reporter Cassidy Hubbarth opened by asking about the scandal.

Silver said he was “deeply disturbed” upon hearing the news.

“There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition,” he said.

Silver also praised Amazon’s coverage: “I should have started [by saying] how excited we are to be on Amazon,” he said. “I guess I wouldn’t have predicted that my first interview on Amazon would be about sports betting.”

The interview underscored how Amazon’s coverage didn’t shy away from real-time news relevance — adding a traditional journalistic layer within a tech-powered broadcast.

It was also a surreal moment: the NBA’s top official discussing a sports betting scandal during the league’s debut on a platform now integrating betting tools into its stream.

Amazon has other new tech-fueled features including advanced NBA stats powered by Amazon Web Services — but I didn’t notice that during Friday’s broadcast.

One of the only stumbles for me came on the Fire TV user experience, which feels clunky compared to mobile or desktop. Navigation wasn’t intuitive, and the remote’s button mapping made simple actions harder than expected.

But overall, the whole experience felt less like a tech demo and more like a finished product.

Amazon’s sports strategy is crystalizing: use live sports to drive Prime signups and boost engagement across its ecosystem. The broadcast was promoted on Amazon’s homepage and apps. Live sports also helps fuel Amazon’s growing advertising business.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying $1.8 billion annually for the NBA rights.

As more people cut the cord, sports leagues are increasingly partnering with tech companies as their existing deals with traditional cable providers expire. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are hungry for valuable content such as live sports to draw more subscribers to their respective platforms.

Amazon also aired the Timberwolves vs. Lakers game on Friday evening. It will stream 66 regular season games this year, along with some playoff games.

The company also separate deals to air the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, WNBA, and Premier League, among other sports-related programming on its Prime Video platform.

The NBA debut on Friday was a reminder of Amazon’s approach to live sports: combine the reliability of broadcast TV with subtle tech layers — such as betting, data, and e-commerce — built on its AWS cloud infrastructure and Prime membership model.

The prime crew nails it again 👏

More of this and fewer hot takes! https://t.co/G3IN2BOyFO pic.twitter.com/swHUtlVXXN

— Oh No He Didn't (@ohnohedidnt24) October 25, 2025

A detailed explanation of this week’s Amazon Web Services outage, released Thursday morning, confirms that it wasn’t a hardware glitch or an outside attack but a complex, cascading failure triggered by a rare software bug in one of the company’s most critical systems.

The company said a “faulty automation” in its internal systems — two independent programs that began racing each other to update records — erased key network entries for its DynamoDB database service, triggering a domino effect that temporarily broke many other AWS tools.

AWS said it has turned off the flawed automation worldwide and will fix the bug before bringing it back online. The company also plans to add new safety checks and improve how quickly its systems recover if something similar happens again.

Amazon apologized and acknowledged the widespread disruption caused by the outage.

“While we have a strong track record of operating our services with the highest levels of availability, we know how critical our services are to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses,” the company said, promising to learn from the incident.

The outage began early Monday and impacted sites and online services around the world, again illustrating the internet’s deep reliance on Amazon’s cloud and showing how a single failure inside AWS can quickly ripple across the web.

Related: The AWS outage is a warning about the risks of digital dependance and AI infrastructure

Unless you’ve been on a “digital cleanse” this week, you know that Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a major outage at the start of the week.

You know this because apps and sites you use were down. Credible reports estimate at least 1,000 sites and apps were affected. Large swaths of modern digital life went dark: from finance (Venmo and Robinhood) to gaming (Roblox and Fortnite) to communications (Signal and Slack). Some people couldn’t even get a good night’s sleep because the outage took out “smart beds.” Even sporting events were impacted when Ticketmaster failed.

We’ve seen outages before, but this one seemed broader and harder to ignore.

In the wake of the outage, many well-intentioned hot takes boiled down to: “They should’ve used more cloud providers.”

Setting aside the subtle victim-blaming, there’s also the fact that in a world with only three major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) if you want to “diversify” there’s not a lot of diversity out there.

And the argument for diversity in cloud providers is really about market diversity, not individual organizations juggling multiple vendors. More competition in the cloud market would mean fewer cascading failures when one provider goes down.

The key question when something like this happens is whether we’re taking the risk lessons and expanding them beyond the immediate problem to see the emerging problems. 

Instead of saying organizations need to have multiple cloud providers, we should be asking how we’re dealing with the reality of highly concentrated risks with exceptionally broad impact because we just had an object lesson in what that really means.

In this recent outage there’s a pointer to where we should be looking proactively to apply this lesson: generative AI. This recent AWS outage gives us two lessons for the emerging generative AI ecosystem.

Concentration crisis in AI

With the generative AI ecosystem, I’m talking not about chatbots — I mean AI-native applications that are built on generative AI as a platform. We just saw that when there’s no cloud, there’s no cloud-native application. Likewise, when there’s no generative AI provider, there’s no AI-native application.

The first lesson from the AWS outage for AI-native applications is what happens to an industry when there’s a limited number of providers for centralized resources and there’s an outage. We just saw: it has huge rippling effects across the industry and all walks of life built on it.

It’s a throwback to the mainframe era: when “the computer” is down, it’s down for everyone.

There are as few, if not fewer, generative AI providers as there are cloud providers. A major outage is inevitable — that’s just engineering reality. When that happens, every AI-native app built on that generative AI platform will also go down, full stop.

The impact could be even more severe than the AWS outage. It will be more like “the computer is down, and the people are gone” for many different industries and services. Ironically, the “smarter” the industry and service, the greater the potential fallout.

The second lesson is one of intertwined risk. OpenAI itself was affected by this week’s AWS outage. 

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.

This is not to say don’t do cloud or don’t do AI. But it is to say we need to understand this new, complex intertwining of risks inherent in a world where everything is relying on a small number of key providers and that small number of key providers also rely on a small number of key providers.

The realities of physical requirements and capital investment required for cloud and generative AI make a truly diverse ecosystem impracticable for either. I don’t think anyone sees more than a literal handful of providers for either of these in the future. 

The bottom line

Highly concentrated risks with exceptionally broad impact aren’t going away anytime soon. 

But the growth of generative AI providers — and their reliance on cloud providers — show where there is going to be growth and where and what those risks will be. The growth will be upwards, as technologies stack on top of and rely on each other. And that means these risks are only going to become more concentrated and the impacts even broader.

In the world of security, there’s the “CIA” triad: “confidentiality”, “integrity” and “availability.” In the first days of “Trustworthy Computing” at Microsoft, the principles included “availability.” But in recent years, availability has been overlooked often as security and privacy concerns understandably dominate.

A thoughtful application of the AWS outage tells us that outages like this are a kind of problem that isn’t an anomaly: it’s inherent in the nature of today’s technology reality. And since there are no easy solutions and only increasingly complex problems around this, we need to start understanding this new reality and thinking seriously about how to mitigate these risks.

Amazon’s e-commerce customers are experiencing unusual delivery delays following the Amazon Web Services outage on Monday — suggesting that the cloud glitch has impacted the company’s own operations more than previously reported.

Customers posting on Reddit and X reported Amazon orders that were scheduled for Monday delivery but did not arrive. Some of the comments:

• “I received a delay email on everything due today. Coming tomorrow and I’m fine with that.”
• “I have 4 items that are suppose to be delivered today as well and they haven’t even left the facility. So I’m sure it’s the outage.”
• “My amazon fresh order was cancelled at 5:15PM.”

Amazon workers posting on the “r/AmazonFC” Reddit community cited downtime at fulfillment centers.

• “Today was the first day I’ve experienced an entire day of downtime, and not as a shutdown for maintenance. Very odd feeling to maintain a constant state of readiness for 10 hours in case the system comes back at any moment.”

We reached out to Amazon for details about delayed deliveries.

Amazon’s package fulfillment systems run atop AWS infrastructure — so disruptions in key AWS services can ripple directly into its retail and logistics network.

Amazon’s logistics arm processes about 17.2 million delivery orders per day, according to Capital One.

The fallout from delayed deliveries could lead to increased costs due to potential refund obligations and additional labor needs.

The outage started shortly after midnight Monday and lasted for about three hours, but the aftershock effects were felt by Amazon’s cloud customers for much of the day. The company blamed a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB service in US-EAST-1 region, it oldest and largest digital hub. Major outages originating from this same region also caused widespread disruptions in 2017, 2021, and 2023.

The outage impacted everything from sites including Facebook, Coinbase, and Ticketmaster, to check-in kiosks at LaGuardia Airport. Amazon’s own retail site, its Prime Video streaming service, and its Ring subsidiary were also affected.

Despite the major outage, Amazon’s stock was up Monday and in early Tuesday trading.

The effects of the massive AWS outage reached the sports world on Monday.

Ticketmaster was dealing with ticket management issues as a result of the outage, according to messages shared by several sports teams hosting games on Monday, including the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Seahawks.

The Blue Jays, facing off against the Seattle Mariners in a Game 7 MLB playoff bout at Rogers Centre in Toronto, posted a statement earlier Monday about the outage and advised fans to “hold off on managing your tickets as we work through this.”

A few hours later, the team said ticket management was returning to normal.

>World Series appearance on the line
>AWS outage sends Ticketmaster down
>Blue Jays fans can't access Game 7 tickets
>Blue Jays opponent…Seattle
>Amazon headquarters…Seattle https://t.co/OYjjDj5cdf pic.twitter.com/rbNnwKYegG

— Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) October 20, 2025

The Seahawks, which are hosting the Houston Texans for Monday Night Football in Seattle, issued a statement about the outage “that may impact access to Ticketmaster, Seahawks Account Manager, and the Seahawks Mobile App.”

The Detroit Lions, hosting their own Monday Night Football game, also had ticketing impacted.

The outage effects went beyond just ticketing. The Premier League said its VAR tech system, used to determine offside calls in soccer, would not be available for Monday’s match between West Ham and Brentford.

Amazon’s outage began shortly after midnight Pacific in Amazon’s Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) region, which is AWS’s oldest and largest cloud region, a popular nerve center for online services.

In an initial update, AWS said the outage was related to a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB product, meaning the internet’s phone book failed to find the correct address for a database service used by thousands of apps to store and find data.

Amazon later said the root cause of the outage was an “underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

By 3 p.m. PT, the company said all AWS services had returned to normal operations.

Major sites and services including Facebook, Snapchat, Coinbase and Amazon itself were impacted — reviving concerns about the internet’s heavy reliance on the cloud giant.

The outage suggests that many sites have not adequately implemented the redundancy needed to quickly fall back to other regions or cloud providers in the event of AWS outages.

Previously:

• AWS outage was not due to a cyberattack — but shows potential for ‘far worse’ damage
• AWS outage hits major apps and services, resurfacing old questions about cloud redundancy