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So, let me get this straight. Amazon Web Services, the digital landlord for a massive chunk of the internet, face-plants for 15 hours. Your favorite apps stop working, websites go dark, and for a moment, the digital world holds its breath. And what happens to Amazon’s stock? It goes up. Not just a little, but a 4.2% jump, its best two-day gain in months.
This is insane. No, "insane" doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm symptom of a market that has completely detached from reality. The plumbing of the internet breaks, and the guy who owns the plumbing gets a bonus. What kind of upside-down world are we living in?
So, The Internet Broke. Who Cares?
The official story, spoon-fed to us by Wall Street analysts, is a masterclass in corporate gaslighting. Mark Malek at Siebert Financial said investors were "more focused on Amazon's AI-driven growth story than a fleeting technical stumble." A fleeting stumble? This wasn't a typo in a press release; this was a core service, DynamoDB, taking a nosedive and causing a cascade of failures across the web (AWS Outage: Why Amazon Stock Didn't Take A Hit From Cloud Crash). But who cares about operational competence when you can just whisper the magic letters "A" and "I"?
It’s like your house is on fire, but the insurance adjuster is too busy admiring the new smart toaster you bought to notice. The "AI-driven growth story" is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s a magic wand that makes catastrophic failures disappear. It’s the reason Amazon can underperform the rest of the Magnificent Seven for most of the year, suffer a massive public outage, and still come out smelling like roses.
And the excuses don't stop there. Another analyst, Gil Luria, pointed out that switching costs from AWS are "so high" that customers won't leave over one little outage. Translation: "We’ve got you trapped, so we don't actually have to be perfect." Imagine your local power company saying that. It’s the kind of brazen confidence that only a near-monopoly can buy. Are we just supposed to accept that the digital infrastructure we all depend on is too big to fail, and therefore too big to be held accountable?
"Don't Panic," Says the Guy Selling You Something
Every time the market does something completely illogical, they trot out the same guys with the same tired advice. Jason Moser from The Motley Fool tells us not to panic, to see down markets as an "opportunity." He says to "get rich slowly" by buying an S&P 500 index fund and holding on for dear life. It's the financial equivalent of being told to eat your vegetables.
And sure, that’s probably sound advice for the average person who just wants to retire someday. But it feels utterly disconnected from the nonsense we just witnessed. We're told to look for long-term value, to think like an owner. But what value is there in a company whose core product breaks down for an entire business day? The market's reaction suggests the "value" has nothing to do with the actual service being provided. It's just a bet on a name, a ticker symbol. It ain't about fundamentals anymore.
The advice is always to ignore the headlines about layoffs and shutdowns and just keep shoveling your money into the machine. They tell you to think like an owner, not a trader, but honestly... what does owning a piece of this even mean? You don't get a say. You just get to watch the stock go up when the company succeeds and, apparently, also when it fails spectacularly. It’s like being a fan of a sports team that gets awarded points even when they fumble the ball. Meanwhile, the average investor trying to pick a solid company like Target (`tgt stock`) or a legacy player like AT&T (`at and t stock`) gets punished for the slightest misstep in their earnings report. The rules are just different for the giants like Amazon and Microsoft (`msft stock`). Offcourse they are.
And We're the Crazy Ones
Here's the real takeaway from Amazon's no-bad-news week: the stock market is not a reflection of reality. It’s a high-stakes fantasy league where the points are awarded based on narrative, hype, and the collective delusion that a handful of tech companies are immortal gods who can do no wrong. An outage that cripples businesses globally is written off as a "small drag." A promise of future AI-powered robots is treated as more tangible than a present-day system failure. The whole thing is a joke, and we’re the punchline. We’re told to be patient, disciplined investors in a system that rewards chaos and ignores incompetence, as long as it comes from the right address. Good luck with that.