The Indicator from Planet Money Amazon's outage, anxious retirees, and LA brings the Heat, too
37 snips
Oct 24, 2025 This week dives into a significant global internet outage caused by a DNS failure at Amazon Web Services, sparking discussions about service agreements and the necessity for backup plans. It also uncovers a surprising trend where 44% of Americans plan to claim Social Security early, triggered by fears of insolvency. Additionally, California boosts its film industry with expanded tax credits, aiming to attract productions like Heat 2, promising local economic benefits.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
AWS Concentration Creates Systemic Risk
- About 30% of the global internet runs on Amazon Web Services, creating concentrated risk when AWS fails.
- The March outage caused cascading errors across many services and lasted hours, showing systemic fragility.
Contracts Limit Cloud Liability
- Outages usually don't produce major financial penalties because contracts limit liability to small credits.
- Investors shrugged, with Amazon shares rising, indicating high switching costs and customer lock-in.
Prepare Multi-Region Backups
- Do build redundancy and multi-region backups instead of relying on a single cloud provider region.
- Avoid single points of failure by preparing alternative providers or regions for critical services.
