A recent global outage that took hospitals, banks, and apps offline did nothing to slow Amazon’s cloud dominance. Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a 20% year-over-year revenue increase to $33bn, its strongest growth since 2022.
The disastrous outage, which lasted for hours, inadvertently became a show of AWS’s power, revealing how much of the modern internet relies on its infrastructure. Wall Street, unconcerned by the glitch, had only estimated $32.42bn in revenue for the division.
This cloud revenue powered Amazon’s entire quarter. The parent company beat expectations with $180.17bn in total revenue and $1.95 earnings per share, causing its stock to leap 9% in after-hours trading.
The company is now focusing on the AI boom, where it has lagged behind competitors like Microsoft. Executives on the earnings call promoted the Rufus AI shopping assistant and the expansion of the Zoox robotaxi business.
The financial good news was paired with a major corporate restructuring involving 14,000 layoffs. CEO Andy Jassy told investors the cuts were not driven by AI, but by a “culture” shift to adopt a “startup-style” mentality.