A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage highlights the consequences of losing senior engineers who have been working on the company’s systems for decades. The outage, which affected half the internet, was caused by a DNS issue in the US-EAST-1 region, leading to cascading failures and widespread disruptions.
This is not an isolated incident, but rather a symptom of a larger problem: the talent drain at AWS. Senior engineers who have been with the company for years are leaving, taking their institutional knowledge with them. This has resulted in a decrease in redundancy and expertise, making it more challenging to detect and recover from outages.
The outage occurred when AWS began investigating increased error rates and latencies in multiple services, but it took 75 minutes to identify the root cause of the problem. The company’s status page initially displayed an “all is well” message, further exacerbating the issue.
AWS has a reputation for being good at infrastructure, but this latest outage shows that even they can struggle with complex issues. As the senior engineers who have been working on the systems leave, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the same level of expertise and redundancy.
The market may forgive AWS this time, but the pattern will continue if the company does not address the talent drain and lack of institutional knowledge. It is essential for AWS to recognize that technology is not the problem; people are. The next outage is already brewing, and it’s only a matter of time before an understaffed team trips over an edge case first.
The loss of senior engineers has significant implications for AWS’s service reliability. As they leave, in-house expertise is lost, and the company must reinvent the wheel to maintain its RTO games and avoid Layoff Roulette. The talent drain is a ticking time bomb that will eventually lead to spectacular failures unless addressed promptly.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn