User complaints surged on tracking site DownDetector just after noon Eastern time, with most reports concentrated in the company’s US-EAST-1 region.

Amazon has multiple strong economic moats. Its cloud and e-commerce businesses have tremendous growth prospects. The company is also continually looking for new markets to conquer. Amazon is no longer the scrappy start-up it was in 1997.

Experts say the incident revealed what can happen when a such a broad spectrum of companies rely on singular cloud provider.

Amazon will report earnings after the closing bell on Thursday. Analysts want updates on AI progress, AWS, and retail margins.

On Wednesday Amazon announced the completion of its data-center initiative Project Rainier, which will primarily be used to service Anthropic's compute needs. The company expects Anthropic's Claude to be using over one million of Amazon's custom Trainium2 chips by year-end.

The company that invented the cloud business is widely perceived as trailing its rivals in artificial intelligence.

Amazon analysts highlight the company's accelerated growth for its AWS cloud segment in the third quarter and strong guidance ahead.

Microsoft's Azure platform and other company services are experiencing an outage that started around 12:00 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. The company reported that the outage was triggered by "an inadvertent configuration change" that impacted the Azure Front Door delivery network.

AWS was the star of the retail giant's Q3 earnings report, with sales in the cloud business growing 20% year-over-year.

Analyst expectations coming into the Q3 quarterly release are for Amazon to report $177.8 bln in revenue, $1.58 in EPS, and $23.7 bln in operating income. Read more