Copyright The New York Times
Andrew here. We’ve got some news on the government shutdown. But I want to focus for a moment on a different kind of outage: Amazon Web Services, which went down for hours overnight, though it’s coming back now. Its failure temporarily shuttered or slowed sites including Venmo, Robinhood, Facebook and even those of some airlines. It is a rare occurrence — but one that demonstrates just how critical these services have become. They are the equivalent of electricity for much of our economy. And the truth is that they are too big to fail. The bitter shutdown pill The U.S. government shutdown has entered Day 20 — with little progress in sight. So far, investors have shrugged off the impasse. But the crisis is carrying a growing economic and political cost. The biggest consequences of the shutdown are perhaps in health care.
