You know that feeling when you’re trying to load a website and it just won’t budge? Now imagine that happening to half the internet at once. Yeah, that’s exactly what went down on October 22nd, and honestly, it’s got me thinking about where we’re really headed with all this tech stuff.
Let me walk you through what’s been happening lately because it’s kind of wild. We’ve got infrastructure falling apart, thousands of people losing their jobs, and somehow, in the middle of all this chaos, Nvidia is out here breaking records like it’s no big deal. Something doesn’t add up, right?
When AWS Sneezes, The Internet Catches a Cold
So here’s what happened. Amazon Web Services went down, and it wasn’t just a small hiccup. It was like watching dominoes fall in slow motion, except each domino was a service you probably use every day.
The official word was that it was a DNS issue with DynamoDB. Sounds technical, but think of it this way: DynamoDB is like the foundation of a building. You might not see it, but it’s holding up everything else. When that foundation cracks, floors above it start collapsing one by one. That’s essentially what happened to the internet that day.
Here’s the thing that really gets me though. We always talk about how the internet is this vast, distributed network spanning the globe. But when one provider goes down and takes massive chunks of the web with it, you realize how centralized everything actually is. It’s like finding out that all the restaurants in your city get their ingredients from the same supplier. Sure, they have different menus, but if that supplier has a bad day, everyone’s closing early.
Companies love to say they’re cloud-native and resilient, but this outage exposed something uncomfortable. Most businesses are putting all their eggs in one basket, or maybe two if they’re being extra careful. The solution everyone talks about is multi-vendor, multi-region deployments. In plain English, that means spreading your stuff across different providers and different locations. Think of it like not keeping all your money in one bank account.
But here’s the reality check: doing that costs money, takes time, and requires expertise. For a startup trying to move fast, it’s tempting to just stick with one provider and hope for the best. Until days like October 22nd remind us why that’s risky.
The Layoff Wave That Nobody Saw Coming
Right after the AWS mess, Amazon dropped another bomb. Reports started floating around about 30,000 layoffs. That’s not a small number. That’s a small city worth of people suddenly looking for new jobs.
Now, I keep hearing people say this is just a correction from the hiring spree during COVID. Remember 2021 and 2022? Companies were hiring like there was no tomorrow. AI was the hot new thing, everyone needed more engineers, more product managers, more of everything. It felt like if you could spell “Python,” you had three job offers waiting.
But here’s what confuses me. You see these massive layoff announcements, then you go to the same company’s careers page and there are still hundreds of open positions. How does that work? It’s like a restaurant firing half its waiters while putting up a “Now Hiring” sign out front. There’s probably some internal logic to it, some strategy about restructuring teams or shifting focus, but from the outside, it just looks contradictory.
The bigger picture here is that it’s making people nervous. If you’re a developer or someone trying to break into tech right now, these headlines are scary. You’re watching established companies with thousands of employees suddenly cutting loose experienced people, and you’re wondering where you fit into all this.
The Nvidia Paradox — Keeps on going new Highs
And then there’s Nvidia. While everyone else is dealing with outages and layoffs, Nvidia just casually crossed the five trillion dollar market cap threshold. Five. Trillion. Dollars.
Every time I think their stock has peaked, it finds a way to climb higher. It’s like watching someone play a video game on easy mode while everyone else is stuck on hard difficulty. The reason is obvious: AI. Or more specifically, the chips that make AI possible. Every company doing anything with artificial intelligence needs Nvidia’s hardware. They’ve basically become the arms dealer in an AI gold rush.
But this is where things get interesting. All of these events, the AWS outage, the layoffs, Nvidia’s rise, they’re all connected to the same underlying question: are we in an AI bubble?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The pattern feels familiar. Massive investment, sky-high valuations, companies pivoting everything toward AI whether it makes sense or not. It reminds me of stories about the dot-com boom, where investors were throwing money at anything with a website.
The AWS outage showed us how fragile our infrastructure really is. The layoffs suggest that maybe companies overextended themselves betting on endless growth. But Nvidia’s success says the AI train is still accelerating. So which signal do we trust?
Maybe we’re at the tip of something. Maybe we’re waiting for our own domino effect, like the AWS outage but bigger, to reveal that the emperor has no clothes. Or maybe AI really is different this time, and we’re just in the messy middle of a genuine transformation.
What This Means for People Like Us
Here’s the honest truth that nobody wants to hear: it’s getting harder for newcomers. When companies are cutting experienced engineers, they’re definitely not rolling out the red carpet for people trying to break in. The bar keeps rising, and the competition keeps getting fiercer.
But before you close this tab and have an existential crisis, let me share something important. The answer isn’t to panic or give up. The answer is to keep learning, but smarter.
Don’t just chase AI because it’s hot right now. Yes, understand it, play with it, see what it can do. But also build depth in areas you’re genuinely interested in. Learn how systems work, how infrastructure is designed, how to think about reliability and scale. These fundamentals don’t change every six months like the hot new framework does.
The AWS outage wasn’t caused by lack of AI knowledge. It was caused by complex systems behaving in unpredictable ways. The people who can understand and fix those problems will always be valuable, regardless of what the current hype cycle is.
Diversify your knowledge the same way you’d diversify your investments. Be good at something specific, but understand how it connects to the bigger picture. Learn a bit of infrastructure, a bit of frontend, a bit of data, whatever genuinely interests you. That breadth gives you options when one area gets crowded or unstable.
Looking Ahead
We’re living through interesting times in tech, and not always in the good way. The next few months and years are going to be bumpy. There will probably be more outages, more layoffs, and more dramatic swings in company valuations.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: technology isn’t going anywhere. We’re not going back to a world without the internet, without cloud services, without AI. The question isn’t whether these technologies matter. The question is how we build them more resiliently, how we create sustainable businesses around them, and how we make space for new people to contribute.
Stay curious. Keep building things. Learn from the chaos. And maybe keep your resume updated, just in case. Because if there’s one thing these last few weeks have taught us, it’s that in tech, anything can happen, and usually does.
TLDR Cheat Sheet
What Happened: AWS outage on Oct 22 took down huge portions of the internet due to DynamoDB DNS issues
The Domino Effect: Single point of failure showed how centralized our “distributed” internet really is
Best Practice: Multi-vendor, multi-region deployments reduce risk but cost time and money
Amazon Layoffs: Reports of 30,000 job cuts despite ongoing job postings on careers page
Nvidia Success: Hit $5 trillion market cap while others struggle, driven by AI chip demand
AI Bubble Question: Unclear if we’re at peak hype or genuine transformation; signals point both ways
For Job Seekers: Getting harder to break in; focus on fundamentals and diverse skills, not just trendy tech
Key Takeaway: Keep learning broadly, build depth in areas you care about, and stay adaptable
Survival Strategy: Understand systems and infrastructure, not just surface-level frameworks and tools
Reality Check: Tech isn’t disappearing, but the path forward will be bumpier than the 2020–2022 boom years