Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps With AI Days Before Crash
More evidence: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-aws-cloud-computing-unit-cuts-least-hundreds-jobs-sources-say-2025-07-17/ but back in July this year.
https://80.lv/articles/amazon-allegedly-replaced-40-of-aws-devops-workers-with-ai-days-before-crashOpen linkView original on piefed.social648
Comments83
To be fair, this is 2025, there's no trustworthy data about anything any more.
Hell, you might just be an AI. Or I might just be an AI. Or maybe there wasn't even an outage. I didn't notice any issues, so maybe AI hallucinated it, or it's been made up as clickbait and been second-hand reported by thousands of news sites that don't care about fact checking any more.
Not that there are facts any more, anyway.
The news could report on a non existent attack on US soul and suddenly trigger world war 2
Amazon is laying off or has lost truly staggering numbers of experienced staff.
So it might not be AI, although my experience with AI suggests it's right about 60% of the time and there's no way I would let it implement it's own recommendations anywhere near anything that earned me money.
It might just be cheaper, younger, newer staff making mistakes they don't know how to fix.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
More likely their hamfisted return to work layoff scheme has caused them to bleed experienced staff. The only people left are less experienced and give less of a shit. It took them over an hour to realize the database of their DNS system was the issue.
I asked a buddy that works at Amazon about the outage and he pointed me to this article.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
I know quite a few people who currently work there and pretty much all of them are trying to leave.
This is a really good article. Thanks for posting it.
I wonder how long AI will function when it starts feeding on AI generated junk data. Like a photocopy of a photocopy.
This report is a blog linking to a blog.
https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops-team-then-let-ai-take-their-jobs-d9db9d298bfa
Thanks I didnt see that. Ill add it to the description.
I really want this to be true, because not only I believe that would be the immediate outcome, but also because it would be hilarious.
But a somewhat credible source that's not wrapped in "allegedly" and old stories would really help drive the point home.
I know there's doubt as to the validity of the claims. I only want to say this: when "AI" takes jobs, who is there to plug things in to make the "AI" machine go?
Sounds like Amazon fucked around and found out.... Allegedly.
A handful of senior engineers or developers. And then we're even more ducked when they retire or die, because the no-one is hiring junior engineers or developers
The good ones leave as things turn to shit, or we're laid off because their salaries were too high.
What a great idea to test this on paying customers' live production websites.
I'd believe them if they said they tested small- scale locally. Even good software/designs can implode when they get scaled up, and I doubt this was good design or software.
Absolute fucking MORONS have taken over the world, and are wrecking it.
IF we ever get our country back, we have to go forward with a national strategy that we no longer have to be polite to treasonous MAGA scumbags. Everytime they open their mouths they should be shouted down with screams to shut the fuck up.
We should never have to tolerate the opinions of stupid, violent traitors.
They'll all pretend they were never MAGA, why are you still going on about Trump, we're trying to look forward, etc.
This is exactly how the GOP disowned the Bush II Administration with the Tea Party.
And that's when we have to scream the loudest, and absolutely refuse to give their gaslighting any credibility at all. If you were a Republican during this era, then you are a MAGA Traitor, racist, rapist, incompetent, intolerant, violent, stupid, pedophile.
And you ALWAYS will be, forever.
Could give em the Hans Landa treatment
Works for me. Brand a Swastika, or MAGA, or PedoCon, or Traitor, etc. Maybe give them their choice.
MBAs are mortal enemies of software engineers. Couple that with what one former CEO of mine said: "engineers have very well tuned bullshit detectors" and you arrive at the problem...
This happens with any disruptive tech. In the 80s, Old white CEOs were computerizing everything without understanding computers. 2025 every grey CEO throws around A1 without having the first clue how it works.
Just open the bottle and pour it on your well-done steak?
Probably a reference to secretary of education calling it A1
I see. I can't keep up!
We can send them to work camps like during the Depression.
I’m already there. I don’t hide my revulsion.
DevOps cannot be automated away. So stupid.
DevOps is one of the most automated parts of software development and deployment actually.
Article seems like complete bullshit anyway.
....noooooo, it most definitely isn't.
While the job does deal heavily in automating things, it only automates Boolean things. Looking at a platform and seeing why and where it's failing is not a Boolean thing, and never will be. It's the same reason we still don't have machines that repair cars over 100 years after their introduction.
Exactly. DevOps engineers are already super skilled at using automation where appropriate, but knowing how and when to do that is still an extremely human task
AI can see why and where it's failing too if it has the appropriate permissions and access.
No it's not. DevOps is all software, repairing cars is not. Car ECUs can tell you exactly what is wrong with your car.
🤣
Okay bud, go and tell AWS, Google, Salesforce, and any other of these companies who think "AI" is an answer to everything, because they've all had very public outages due to this exact same thing in the past few months.
You have no idea what DevOps is or how it works if you think any of this is easily done or solved with these junk tools.
AI in devops caused their outages?
Do you even know what Octopus is for example? Azure DevOps?
Again, refer to my first comment because you're out of your league here 🤣🤦
Already replied to that and showed why you're wrong.
I do DevOps and Software Dev for multi-billion dollar companies btw.
Automation with a lot of validation steps that are not very obvious. Because if they were, we'd have automated them away.
Devops is often figuring out why automation didn't work.
Absolutely, but that's not an argument against what i said.
I feel like it's directly contradicting what you were implying...
It absolutely isn't. Doing the automation is DevOps as well. Do you think that tools like Octopus Deploy or Azure DevOps don't work, or aren't DevOps?
Tried to figure out yesterday why a user couldn't ssh into a server, tried LLMs to figure it out, completely useless. Had to go into some log file somewhere to find out the one who set up the server made a specific group for ssh and if a user wasn't in that group they couldn't connect. The LLMs (ChatGPT and Gemini) gave me bullshit about changing flags in the sshd config...
Easy fix: give an LLM root access to all production critical servers and allow everyone in the company to chat with it.
First reaction: fear.
Second: I chuckled. Because I thought of some VP-level enforcing this joke as SOP.
And then a little more fear, as a treat.
Haha if that happens it is time to get out fast
Cool story. LLMs can't see error messages in logs if you don't give them access to it. Had you given the AI agent access to those files? Or were you just using a standalone LLM with no access to the system?
DevOps is not executing the automation, but designing it. DevOps is not manually spinning up pods but writing the automation that does so.
Why do you think AI can't easily be the supervisor for pipelines and create new ones? It's basically just creating steps that are well known from building a branch to deploying it.
Try it out and you'll see. Amazon seems to be doing great with it.
The AWS outage had nothing to do with AI lol.
Sure, clanker.
Sure, luddite.
Most of my work in DevOps isn't in front of my text editor writing scripts. It's spent hopping between dashboards, drafting emails, doing RCA, teaching dev team members how to use pipelines, and getting requirements from them for designing new pipelines. Then inevitably debating with them about design considerations when they ask for a set of procedures that won't pan out.
Until your AI is a fully fledged team member who everyone can feel comfortable engaging with as if they were a real human, you cannot possibly begin to automate this.
Mine either - we use azure devops, octopus, etc - tools that automate devops. Most of devops is automated across the board - no big companies are manually kicking off builds for every PR and pushing the files around the place and then manually deploying them - it's all automated using devops tools. Having AI build and manage these pipelines seems like a logical place to use it, as they are all just about creating steps using pieces from previous steps and other systems.
You absolutely could have AI create a pipeline to build, test, and deploy a solution, and then test the actual deployed solution. The AI is essentially just the coordinator here, tying together the other devops tools.
I doubt it. Even the article claims that there's been no news about layoffs since July. No mentions from laid off engineers online either.
July isn't "days before", unless you're really stretching "days"
Days before the Queen of England died, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? (Literally no, but I sure could speculate).
The execs started buying into their own bullshit…
Ah yes trustworthy source 80.lv
Look into this source for like 2 seconds, it is a marketing research company, not journalists, with extremely suspicious and likely generated team. https://80.lv/contact-us#audience https://my.linkedin.com/in/arti-sergeev the "Head" of 80 level doesn't even seem like a real person, definitely not a real picture.
So you’re saying the 80.lv “team” are AI generated? Wouldn’t that be ironic…AI making shit up about AI.
Uhh, why do you say that's not a real pic?
Literally everything about that site is generated. It is possible it is the real picture of a Russian guy who went to online school that lives in Malaysia but considering that all the articles, all the stock photos look generated, I'm going to assume the faces are too.
Ok so you're bullshitting based on assumptions. Maybe you're right maybe you're wrong. Got it.
I know for a fact this is a fake article with no proof lol that is enough for me. Sorry you lack critical thinking skills and media literacy
You know for a fact something that you cannot prove outside of your own personal intuition. This is why we can't have nice things.
Wow ai has gotten really good https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2499164710468188&set=pb.100011240502375.-2207520000&type=3
He even has the right number of fingers and various pictures in different states of shaving, dress, environments. If that guy is ai, I'd hire him.
"the only winning move is not to play"
Amazon has laid off or scared off the vast majority of their most experienced people. Those that weren’t laid off quit over stupidity like “RTO”. I don’t doubt that their underpaid junior staff and Kool-Aid drinking upper management decided that AI is a great way to replace all the lost knowledge and expertise. As with the downfall of civilization, this will get much worse before it gets better. It will be interesting to see how huge companies react to another companies enshittification actively damaging their business and reputation.
amazon also is more burned-out heavy than other tech companies aside from the tesla, i saw all those reviews and the peoples post on reddit.
Yeah I don't trust the source, but I've heard a ton of articles saying they've been replacing people with AI.
We cannot have the internet be centralized on central hardware with so little oversight.
The thing is that Amazon needs to get broken up way more than Ma Bell did. Most people have never heard of AWS before, but it's crazy to have one company own so much of the internet, even before you get into their stranglehold on internet commerce (which also should be broken up).
Why am I not surprised...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/ai-amazon-workforce-jassy.html
It's not tough to see what led to this crash. Occam's razor is pretty clear on this one.
I've been waiting for something like this so we can see who's heads roll when AI fucks up. I figured we'd see doctors and lawyers losing their licenses first, but maybe it'll be this. So, who shoulders the blame when a program that can't learn from its mistakes fucks up a quarter of the internet?
Is there 404 reporting on this yet?
Probably why it crashed then
I wish they'd replace the executives first.
I'd like to read the stackademic link without signing up.
Ask an AI to visit and summarize the page for you /s