Nothing says holiday cheer quite like a cloud computing meltdown. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) found itself dealing with another major Amazon Web Services outage on Christmas Eve, disrupting websites and services across the internet and reminding everyone why putting all your infrastructure eggs in one basket might not be the greatest idea.
When the Cloud Ruins Christmas
The trouble started around 8:41 p.m. EST on December 24, when users began reporting problems with AWS to Downdetector, the outage-tracking service that's become essential reading during these increasingly common disruptions. By 10:52 p.m. EST, Downdetector had logged 3,659 reports of AWS outages, with its live charts showing a sharp spike in complaints. The service tagged the incident with #AmazonWebServicesDown, asking followers how the disruption was affecting their holiday plans. Amazon Web Services didn't immediately respond to requests for comment, presumably because they were busy trying to fix things.
Third Time's Not the Charm
The Kobeissi Letter pointed out on X that this marks the third large-scale AWS crash of 2025. "Amazon Web Services has crashed with tens of thousands of websites currently down," the post noted, accompanied by a chart showing outage reports spiking dramatically over the previous 24 hours. When your cloud infrastructure experiences more crashes than a demolition derby, people start asking uncomfortable questions.
Remember That Earlier Disaster?
This latest incident follows an earlier AWS disruption that took down some serious heavy hitters: Disney+, Reddit, the McDonald's app, and United Airlines all went dark after a DNS issue in the us-east-1 region affected more than 70 services. During that episode, Amazon engineers reported pursuing "multiple parallel paths" to restore functionality while businesses and government websites dealt with elevated error rates and latency issues. Translation: they threw everything at the problem and hoped something would stick.
Christmas Eve brought another wave of social media complaints from users reporting outages across multiple websites, painting a familiar picture of widespread disruption cascading from a single point of failure.
Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Function?
Here's where things get interesting from a policy perspective. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has argued that when one company can effectively shut down large portions of the internet during an outage, it might just be "too big." She's calling for tougher antitrust measures and resilience standards for cloud operators, which sounds reasonable when you consider that technical failures at AWS can simultaneously ground airlines, freeze streaming services, disrupt financial apps, and knock government portals offline.
The repeated outages highlight a genuine systemic risk: we've built a massive chunk of internet infrastructure on top of a handful of cloud providers, and when one of them hiccups, millions of users feel it instantly. For investors, each incident raises questions about operational risk, potential regulatory intervention, and the costs companies might face building redundancy across multiple cloud vendors. Diversification isn't just for investment portfolios anymore.
What This Means for Amazon
Despite the disruptions, Amazon stock ended the day essentially flat, up just 0.1% at $232.38. According to market data, AMZN ranks in the 82nd percentile for quality metrics, suggesting investors aren't panicking over operational hiccups just yet. But with policymakers paying closer attention and each outage generating fresh headlines about cloud monopoly risks, Amazon may find itself navigating trickier regulatory waters ahead.
The fundamental question remains: if one company's technical problems can break the internet for millions of users simultaneously, have we created infrastructure that's too concentrated for comfort? Christmas Eve's outage won't answer that question definitively, but it's certainly keeping the conversation alive.