Amazon workers joke ‘kill switch’ triggered massive outage

Amazon employees said they were left in the dark during a massive outage, fueling claims the tech giant tested a so-called ‘kill switch’.

One staff member made the claim three hours after Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, which caused widespread disruptions across social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.

The employee said in the video posted to TikTok: ‘They don’t have any information for us…. I believe in the kill switch. They are just trying to test it out, and it works.’

Another staffer can be heard in the background adding: ‘They’re cleansing it right now, from everything.’

Typically, when Amazon systems crash, employees are offered Voluntary Time Off (VTO) to go home. One worker suggested that communication may have been limited because the company’s systems were also offline.

The ‘kill switch’ mentioned in the video likely refers to a conspiracy theory claiming that AWS has a secret mechanism to intentionally shut down online infrastructure for control or censorship. 

However, the company cited an ‘operational issue’ affecting multiple services and said it was ‘working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery’.

An AWS spokesperson told Daily Mail: ‘These rumors are completely false. The only place for accurate information on cloud health is the AWS Health Dashboard.’

The Daily Mail has contacted Amazon for comment and has yet to receive a response. 

The TikTok video has since gone viral on X, where many users agreed that the tech giant activated a kill switch. 

‘If they actually have a kill switch and just tested it on their entire workforce, that is genuinely terrifying,’ one user posted. 

However, another user posted on X: ‘An outage like this is the worst possible scenario for the company.

‘The internal systems that provide status updates and VTO were also out. There’s no reason for a company to do this on purpose. Would be lighting a building on fire to see if smoke alarms work.’

Amazon said the outage was related to issues with its domain name system, which converts web addresses into IP addresses – numeric designations that identify locations on the internet. 

DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, said in a Facebook post that it received more than 11 million user reports of issues at more than 2,500 companies. 

Users reported trouble with the social media app Snapchat, the Roblox and Fortnite video games, the online broker Robinhood and the McDonald’s app, as well as Netflix, Disney+ and many other services.

The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Signal chat app both said on X that they were experiencing trouble related to the outage.

Amazon’s own services were also affected. Users of the company’s Ring doorbell cameras and Alexa-powered smart speakers reported that they were not working, while others said they were unable to access the Amazon website or download books to their Kindle.

Many college and K-12 students were unable to submit or access their homework or course materials on Monday because the AWS outage knocked out Canvas, a widely used educational platform.

‘I currently can’t grade any online assignments, and my students can’t access their online materials’ because of the outage’s effect on learning-management systems, said Damien P Williams, a professor of philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

While the exact number of schools impacted was not immediately known, Canvas said on its website that it is used by 50 percent of college and university students in North America, including all Ivy League schools in the US.

At the University of California, Riverside, students could not submit assignments, take quizzes or access course materials, and online instruction was limited, the institution said.

The Ohio State University informed its 70,000 students at all six campuses by email Monday morning that online course materials might be inaccessible due to the outage and that ‘students should connect with their instructors for any alternative plans’.