Millions from around the world were left scrambling on Monday after Amazon Web Services suffered a global outage. The multi-hour outage brought down nearly half the internet — sparking widespread backlash from several quarters. Billionaire businessman Elon Musk also took a swipe at Amazon over the chaotic situation and reminded that his X platform remained unaffected.
“You don’t say,” Musk wrote on X along with a ‘thinking’ emoji.
He also shared an edited news screenshot to underscore his point — contending that AWS now had artificial intelligence pushing 75% of its production code. The article cited by Musk was published in August 2025 but includes no such claim. The X CEO was promptly fact-checked on his own social media platform as readers noticed the discrepancies.
“This image was digitally altered. There is no evidence the AWS CEO said this or something similar…The original article’s title has been changed, and there is no reference in the article to the phrase mentioned in this new and fake title,” the readers’ notes now explain below his post.
Musk also highlighted X as a secure platform amid the outage — noting that there were no “strange AWS dependencies” to hinder users.
“The messages (on X chat) are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange ‘AWS dependencies’ such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head…You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls,” he wrote on X.
What exactly happened?
Social media and gaming apps, cryptocurrency platforms and even leading financial institutions and airline websites — they all came down in one fell swoop as AWS crashed. The first signs of trouble came around 3:11 am Eastern Time as the company reported it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” It later admitted that there were “significant error rates” while assuring that its engineers were “actively working” on the problem.
Amazon Web Services provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.
