Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), which has ambitions of putting a warehouse in the sky and delivering products by drone, among other projects, seemingly can do no wrong, positioning AMZN stock near all-time highs. AMZN stock closed Thursday at $848.91, up 13% year to date, while soaring 53% over the past year.
But, the recent outage of Amazon’s web-based Simple Storage Service (S3), which disrupted websites, apps and smart devices across the country, shows the Seattle-based e-commerce giant isn’t infallible, after all. But, don’t hold your breath thinking this glitch will put a damper on AMZN stock.
According to the company’s statement, the outage impacting the S3 cloud services was due to human error. An issue in the S3 billing process was being debugged by members of the Amazon Simple Storage Service team. In an attempt to rectify the issue, which involved taking down a small number of servers, one of the engineers entered an incorrect keystroke.
“An authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process,” Amazon said in a statement on its website. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.”
The servers that were mistakenly taken down supported two other S3 subsystems, which triggered a widespread outage impacting government services, news sites, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Business Insider, Quora and Slack and a host of other institutions considered significant to the internet infrastructure.
It remains to be seen whether this issue will cause Amazon to lose any customers to competing cloud platforms such as those offered by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) or Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL). To its credit, however, Amazon didn’t try to hide behind its mistake, saying Thursday it was making several changes to avoid the potential of similar problems in the future.
“We want to apologize for the impact this event caused for our customers. While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses.” Amazon said in its statement. “We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.”
Bottom Line for AMZN Stock
Though Amazon might lose some support in terms of AWS being touted as best-of-breed cloud, AMZN stock won’t be affected, given the many growth tailwinds Amazon still has. For fiscal 2017, Amazon is expected to earn $7.25 per share on revenue of $165.2 billion, marking year-over-year increases of 48% and 21.5%, respectively. As such, Amazon stock should continue to march toward $1,000 per share in the next 12-18 months, 18% returns.
As of this writing, Richard Saintvilus did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
