This prediction market topic focuses on whether Amazon Web Services (AWS) will experience a service interruption event classified as 'disrupted' by January 31, 2026. AWS is the world's largest cloud computing platform, providing critical infrastructure for millions of businesses, governments, and organizations globally. The market specifically tracks events visible on the AWS Health Dashboard, which publicly reports service health and operational issues. A 'disrupted' classification indicates a significant service impairment affecting multiple customers, distinct from minor 'performance issues' or 'informational' notifications. The resolution depends on AWS's official severity assessment, making this a direct bet on the platform's operational reliability over a defined period. Interest in this market stems from AWS's central role in the digital economy, where even brief outages can cause widespread economic disruption. Companies across sectors from finance to healthcare rely on AWS for core operations, making service stability a multi-billion dollar concern. Recent years have seen several high-profile AWS outages, drawing attention to cloud concentration risks and prompting organizations to implement multi-cloud strategies for redundancy. This market allows participants to hedge against or speculate on operational risk, reflecting broader concerns about infrastructure resilience in an increasingly cloud-dependent world.

Historical Context

AWS has experienced several notable service disruptions throughout its history, establishing patterns that inform current reliability concerns. The most significant outage occurred on November 25, 2020, when an authentication service failure in the US-EAST-1 region caused widespread service degradation for approximately five hours, affecting major customers including Adobe, Roku, and the Washington Post. This event was classified as a major disruption and highlighted the risks of service concentration in specific availability zones. Another major incident on December 7, 2021, involved the US-WEST-2 region and lasted over seven hours, disrupting services for Amazon's own operations including Alexa and Prime Video. This outage resulted from network device impairments and automated recovery failures. Historically, AWS has maintained generally strong reliability, with most regions achieving 99.99 percent uptime annually, equivalent to approximately 52 minutes of potential disruption per year. However, the increasing complexity of cloud services and growing interdependencies between AWS components have created new failure modes. Past disruptions have typically stemmed from network configuration errors, capacity overloads during peak events, or software deployment issues rather than physical infrastructure failures. These precedents demonstrate that while AWS has robust systems, operational complexity creates inherent disruption risks that this prediction market tracks.

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