Morning Brew Daily - Amazon Outage Knocks Out the Internet & The iPhone 17 is Saving Apple

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Episode 696: Neal and Toby talk about the outage of Amazon Web Services that knocked out basically half of the internet. Then, the iPhone 17 has seemingly been the key to Apple’s comeback as sales have surged in the US…and China! Also, the US is growing impatient with SpaceX putting astronauts on the moon and has opened up a bid to compete to light a fire under Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Toby dives into the weird “6-7” phenomenon that’s captivated teens. Finally, peanut allergies among children hit a new low.  00:00 - The World Series is set 2:10 - Amazon outage knocks out the internet 8:00 - The iPhone keeps Apple afloat 11:10 - NASA thinks SpaceX is too slow 17:00 - Toby’s Trends: Six sevennnnn 21:00 - Sprint Finish! Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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pwc.c.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's pwc.com slash us slash brew AI. Good morning for Daily's show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how a small error by Amazon broke the entire internet.

Then in the midst of apples, it's so over. The iPhone maker found within it in Invincible, we're so back. It's Tuesday, October 21st. Let's ride. Good morning. The World Series Matchup is set, and it happens to be a very appropriate name this year because a team

from Canada is playing in a dramatic game 7 last night that Toronto Blue Jays defeated the Seattle Mariners in the ALCS to book their ticket to the World Series where the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers and their $350 million payroll are waiting. With all of Canada rallying behind their team and baseball fans in Japan tuning in to support the Dodgers

superstar Shohey Otani, it's going to be a truly world series this year. What other storylines should we know about Toby? Well, L.A., Canada, a lot of people are calling this the Kendrick Drake World Series with Kendrick Hailing from L.A. and Drake being, of course, from Toronto. Sure enough, the MLBX account posted a video of Drake going wild when they won last night just to rub salt in the wound. Something tells me that Drake may try and rekindle things with Kendrick, but Kendrick's sort of above it all these days. If I was a Blue Jays fans, though, I would be more concerned about the good old fashion Drake

curse because the rapper has an undeniable knack for Jim. ginsing any teams he root for us. He and I actually share that in common RIP to the Mariners. So I won't go through every team that he's cursed, but I encourage you to look up the Drake curse and good luck Toronto because you're up against the eight ball. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC.

And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.m.S. College PC. Let's head to our first story. Millions of Americans picked up a physical book for the first time in years yesterday after an Amazon Web Services outage knocked out more than 1,000 websites people use for work and for fun.

Wanted to trade stocks and crypto? dice, Robin Hood, Fidelity, and Coinbase were down. Needed to check in for your flight, United, and Delta were on the struggle bus. Wish you could cheat on your homework. AI chatbots like Perplexity were also caught in the crossfire. Craving your wordal fix, New York Times games was broken. Plus, Amazon's own services like its e-commerce marketplace and ring doorbells were disrupted, along with social media sites, Facebook and Snapchat and gaming sites, Fortnite and Roblox.

It's a stark reminder that the internet and global economy are being held up Atlas style by just a handful of cloud providers, Amazon Web Services being the biggest among them. In fact, it's the largest cloud provider in the world underpinning one-third of the entire web. Trouble started a few hours before we taped yesterday's podcast around 3 a.m. Eastern time when a domain name service error took the database in Amazon's key Northern Virginia data centers offline, which impacted services on the East Coast and beyond. By the morning rush, a number of sites were coming back online, but the recovery hit a snag later in the day when some U.S. users reported fresh issues with accessing certain apps. Toby, this doesn't seem as damaging as the crowd strike outage last year that caused global mayhem.

Remember that? But it does raise questions about the Internet's reliance on a few server warehouses in Fairfax County, Virginia. Yeah, it is U.S. East 1. That is a name that you should know if you are, you know, someone who was affected by this outage. What happened here? So a simple update was shipped to this domain name system. DNS. A lot of people describe a DNS system as the internet's phone book. It connects, you know, human friendly donate names. So think something like Google.com to numeric IP addresses that computers

use to identify each other on a network. So when something in that process breaks, essentially any computer trying to access, you know, another computer are getting the equivalent of a wrong number that are unable to find the right destinations, which is why you saw all these data requests balancing and all these sites go down. It actually started affecting Amazon's internal logistics system and then quickly rippled out from there. And what it did too is put a lot of companies that are so-called decentralized industries right in the spotlight. The one that comes to mind initially is Coinbase. Coinbase, you know, is a crypto exchange. Crypto's entire value prop is the fact that it is a decentralized organism. And yet here is one of the biggest

exchanges in the world going down because of a very centralized entity in AWS. Let's just, Look at the scope of the damage. I mean, yes, it did start on Amazon's internal services, but spread far and wide. People couldn't charge their electric vehicles Monday morning because the charging network uses AWS more than 4,000 flights were delayed a bunch of news websites as we were trying to do research for this specific story. We're knocked out, especially the Wall Street Journal Alexa devices could not hear. A lot of people couldn't post on Slack. Students couldn't turn in assignments or materials from their courses. And then a number of British. government websites were also down. So it extended beyond the Atlantic. And again, a lot of people

were reflecting on the fact that, yes, Coinbase is a decentralized service and all these other companies, you know, were relying specifically on Amazon Web Services to keep them afloat. And here we are with this maybe single point of failure. You heard that phrase a lot, single point of failure for the entire internet, entire internet is being propped up by just honestly Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services with their cloud providers. I do think one of the funniest, you know, jokes being made was the fact that Venmo was down. And so you made it yesterday on the show that, hey, I'm going to be a little late in the payments because, you know,

hey, what can I do? It's down right now. But the other segment of the world that melted down, which is a little bit funny, was a wordle because New York Times website went down for a little bit as well. And so a lot of people's whirdle streaks disappeared. And so people are looking at it. Like one person that Business Insider talked to had a 292-day streak snap. That was actually in Manchester over across the pond.

And they were like, what am I going? to do. They legitimately reported all-out body chills. Obviously not the most important part of the entire internet, but it was funny how certain pockets of the web were totally melting down over, you know, this big old outage.

Yeah, so this has happened before for Amazon happened once in 2023, once in 2021, and once in 2017. But you're starting, if you look at the numbers, you're starting to see how much Amazon Web Service has grown to be a key player in holding up the internet.

So Amazon Web Services had a brief stumble back in 2017. Well, back then it was a business that was doing just $20 billion in annual revenue. That's pretty big. But today, Amazon Web Services accounts for about $130 billion in revenue. It's growing 20% per year. It accounts for nearly 20% of Amazon's entire revenue. And it really is its profit center with 60% of its operating profit coming from this very high margin cloud business. I think you're going to start hearing the term multi-cloud,

multi-cloud resilience going forward because all of these businesses are looking at this saying, we're going to need to diversify where our data is living because if it all comes down to AWS, even though it has been a reliable service up until this point, it just cloud centralization causes more and more risks. So I did look though, Amazon stock is up in the early trading right now. So maybe it just shows how important it is to so many businesses. But maybe you'll start to hear some inklings about people trying to diversify their, you know, suppliers to the cloud because you don't necessarily want to have just all the strain on one specific point of failure that can get wiped out in just one early morning outage.

Moving on, after a couple of down years, it looks like the emperor has its new groove back. Apple, for a long time, has been the laggard of the Magnificent 7, falling as much as 31% by April this year, as investors fretted over tariffs and its lack of AI progress. But yesterday, its stock set a new all-time high on the back of old. faithful, the iPhone. After two years of declining or flat iPhone sales, the iPhone 17 is suddenly hot again. According to Counterpoint Research, the latest iPhone outsold its predecessor by 14% in its first 10 days across the U.S. and China. Shipping times are also 13% longer than last year, which is a proxy for strong demand. For as much as people like to poke fun at the lack of a

major hardware change, the iPhone 17's meaningful increase in battery life, camera upgrades, and a fresh orange paint job were enough to convince plenty to upgrade. An analyst from Loop Capital, which aggressively upgraded their long-term price target on Apple yesterday said part of the reason for the upgrade is that we're at the front end of Apple's long anticipated adoption cycle, meaning a lot of people sitting on pandemic-era phones, are finally in the market for a new one. Neil, all of a sudden Apple has gone from worst to first among its peers, trading at 32 times forward earnings, the most expensive member of the Magnificent 7th,

after Tesla. Who needs AI when you have an iPhone? The question analysts are trying to parse now is whether this is an iPhone 17 specific story or this is just part of a broader cycle of people upgrading their iPhones. 350 million iPhone users out of 1.5 billion users worldwide have not upgraded their phones in over four years. That's according to Wedbush's Dan Ives. A lot of people got their previous iPhones back in the pandemic when, all we were doing was scrolling on our phones and we looked at it and were like, we should probably get a new phone. So a lot of people have not had a new phone in four years.

So they were due for an upgrade, but does look like Apple did make meaningful changes to the iPhone 17 specifically that makes it a very compelling proposition compared to at least the iPhone 16, which is absolutely lapping in sales in both U.S. and China, which are its two biggest markets. Perhaps to further the bold case here is that if this iPhone upgrade cycle is in the midst of happening, but Apple Intelligence hasn't even hit its stride yet, then it could have the almost second wave of growth because, you know, Apple intelligence hasn't even rolled out in China, you know, one of the most important markets for the iPhone. So if you have people upgrading to this new phone and then you can roll out an AI system, that's a big if, obviously,

because so far Apple has shown absolutely no ability to capture anyone's intention with their AI efforts. But if you do that and people just have these new phones and maybe you could see how the ball can start rolling again for Apple, which, I mean, we go. back to the beginning of the year, things were looking very dire for Apple because, you know, iPhone sales were not looking good. They were flat or falling. It's AI effort stunk. And then also, you know, tariffs hit it and we thought it was going to be very much affected by that. It's made a massive comeback since then and is now doing just fine admits its magnificent seven peers. So quite a turnaround story for a company that was very beleaguered at the start of

the year. Yesterday, the head of NASA told Elon Musk something he's heard a few times before. You're missing deadlines, pal. Sean Duffy, the NASA administrator, said that he was going to reopen a contract for a lunar lander previously awarded to SpaceX because SpaceX was taking too long getting its starship ready for a moon mission in the next couple of years. And now is not the time to dilly-dally because the U.S. is scrambling to send humans back to the moon before China does to secure the best lunar real estate. In a Fox News interview, Duffy said, we're going to have a space race in regard to American

companies competing to see who can actually get us back to the moon first. I love SpaceX. It's an amazing company, he told CNBC. The problem is they're behind. They push their timelines out and we're in a race against China. Back in 2021, SpaceX was awarded contracts worth $4 billion to use its mega starship rocket to ferry American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the 70s, beating out other companies like Bezos's Blue Origin. To accomplish this, it would need to pull off a series of unprecedented engineering feats like refueling Starship multiple times while in space. But so far, through 11 test launches, Starship has exploded more often than not, leading Duffy to solicit bids from rival rocket companies. Toby, Elon Musk isn't exactly known

for his two-minute drill, and now the space race has a quarterback controversy on its hands. It does because, yes, obviously the rockets keep blowing up, but that is not even the hardest logistical challenge they're trying to pull off. It is this, you know, mid-orbit refueling that has a lot of people scratching their heads because you'd like to see them a little bit further along in the process by now if you are going to pull this off because that engineering feat is something that hasn't been done before. They are literally trying to invent the technology to do this on the fly. And so you see a lot of NASA administrators saying, why did we even go down this path to begin with Jim Burdenstein and NASA administrator during Trump's term? It said in a Senate hearing that

it's an architecture that no NASA administrator I'm aware of would have So just the premise of the launch in general is something that has a lot of people scratching their heads and being a little bit nervous. Obviously, it's Elon. He tends to pull things off that you don't think are possible. But right now, it is not looking super good if we want to get to the moon on the timeline that we're expecting. Who are the alternatives though? There's not that many because while they did give a contract to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's company, for a lunar lander. Blue Origin is also utilizing a similar process for getting these people. to the moon, which is doing rocket refueling in the middle of space, which is very experimental

and it has not been done before. And the timeline is encroaching. So China is planning to go to the moon by 2030, and you have to assume they're going to be on the moon in 2030. Here's the timeline for NASA's. There's three Artemis missions. Artemis 2 is supposed to happen in April, 2026. They're going to send astronauts around the moon. It's kind of like a scoping mission to see what's going on up there at the moon. So they're going to do a 10-day trip. around the moon in April 2026. And then by 2027, that's the goal, is they're going to land maybe two astronauts in the South polar region of the moon in 2027.

So that's three years ahead of China. So they do have a bit of wiggle room here. But SpaceX seems to be dragging its feet a little bit, or not getting Starship in the fitness that it needs to be where they're confident in. We saw a little bit of an anti-Space trade popping off yesterday, too. when this news came out, we saw shares of smaller space company names like Rocket Lab, AST, Planet Labs look a little bit more attractive to investors because maybe there's just a hint that one of them could land some of this contract if things are up for negotiation once

again. So maybe the space trade is back on after a couple of years of not that much excitement around this space, put intended. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends. Welcome to Toby's Trends, the segment where I take a deep. deep dive into the internet to emerge with the trend you can impress your group chat with. And today's trend, I would argue, is the most important one I've done yet if you have a child in middle school right now, because today I am daring to explain the six-seven trend that has swept classrooms around the country. What is six-seven?

If you ask your kids, they will likely tell you it means nothing, which is actually pretty spot on. The phrase is sort of an in-joke among the youth who's paralyzed almost entirely in-confusing adults. You can trace its origins back to a viral song from the rapper Scrilla. The song, Doot, has a lyric that reads 6-7. I just Bip right on the highway, probably in reference to 67th Street in Philly or the Police Code 1067 used to report a death. From there, it made its way to the sports world with edits featuring Hornets, point guard, lamella ball, who

you guessed it, stands 6'7 inches tall. That means human embodiment came in March of this year when a hyperactive suburban middle schooler was caught on camera shouting six, seven at a basketball game, attaching a sort of ironic, overzealous middle school energy to the joke. From there, any mention of six or seven in succession, either on the calendar or in problem sets in school, sends a certain gen alpha demographic. Absolutely buck wild.

Teachers everywhere have no doubt been greeted with the chorus of six, seven, when going about their everyday duties. Neil, this trend is of the skibbitty toilet in Ohio variety, a meaningless phrase whose purpose is divide the insiders from the outsiders. But on a scale of 1 to 10, right now, how confused are you? About a 6 or a 7. You did a good job explaining it, Toby. No, this seems to be the trend of all trends this year, and it has remarkable longevity.

It's amazing what's going on in classrooms, especially math classrooms, because teachers and adults are realizing how much you actually use the word 6 and 7 in your daily life especially teaching math. And whenever they say either one of those words, especially in succession, there is a chorus of kids who are saying six, seven, disrupting the entire classroom experience.

So these teachers are taking interesting tax to figure this out. Some are avoiding breaking kids up into groups of six or seven. They'll never ask them to turn to page 67 in a textbook, and they'll never say, you can take six or seven minutes

on a particular task. That's one way they're doing, they're trying to avoid this. But on the other hand, they're also embracing it by perhaps saying, oh, if I do it, it makes it cringe. And then you guys will stop doing it. We can actually learn something here. I think we are actually helping teachers out right now by talking about it. Admittedly, pretty late to the trend.

I mean, this thing probably peaked a few months ago. But at a certain point, the news outlets finally started to get to it. We're like, all right, I guess we'll talk about it. We are also inherently making it uncool right now. So teachers, you are welcome. But it did penetrate pop culture for sure. I mean, South Park had a whole episode about it where there was. of Colt of 6-7 at the middle school.

And then obviously you've seen it in the sports world a lot too. I mean, even last night, Amaranat St. Brown, a receiver for the Lions, celebrated. There's a hand movement that goes along with it as well. People just celebrate it with it now. It is penetrated to the sports world. Page Beckers dropped 6-7 in a press conference. She was kind of giggling while all the reporters had no idea what was going on. That's kind of just an encapsulation of the trend is one group of people, usually kids, giggling,

while another group of people have no idea what's going on. So in that sense, it's a tale as old of time. Kids have always created just dumb words that mean nothing in order to signify that, hey, I'm a kid, I'm cool, you're an adult, you're not cool. So this is not a new thing by any stretch, even though it probably is the most absurd one to date. One thing I thought was really funny is a bunch of kids went to an in and out, and they just waited until the order 67 was called.

And then they celebrated, and that was a particular video that I saw that went viral on social media. Toby, thank you for trying to explain. six, seven. I know that's one that's been percolating around. We're like, are we going to do it for Toby's trends like for a couple months now? And I think it did a great job. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. History was made in Japan this morning where Senei Takaiichi was elected by lawmakers to become the first women prime minister in the country ever. She's also the first Japanese prime minister to have been a drummer in a heavy metal band and ride motorcycles probably. Takaichi, a conservative whose hero is Britain's Margaret Thatcher,

has advocated for more government spending to rejuvenate Japan's military and industries, but she must also deal with a rising cost of living that has angered the public in the world's fourth largest economy. Her rise to prime minister is a milestone in Japan in particular, a patriarchal country where men dominate the ranks of business leaders and politicians. Japan ranked 118th out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum's most recent global gender gap report. Yeah, let's just dive into her policies a little bit as well. she's expected to push Japan further to the right. She's pretty hawkish on China, but she also wants to reduce her reliance on the U.S. military.

She wants to tighten immigration in tourism rules and has a little bit of a nationalist messaging as well. But at the same time, she is, you know, the first women to ever become prime minister in a very patriarchal country. Her husband actually took her last name, which is not something you see in this culture. So a bit of a contrast between her actual policies and her rise through the ranks as a female lawmaker in a country that, you know, doesn't necessarily make it easy for someone like her to rise to the top. And I think a lot of people will zero in on the fact that she was a

drummer in a heavy metal band. Her favorite bands are Iron Maiden and Deep Purple. And also she loves riding motorcycles in her youth. So those are sort of the counterculture, you know, aspects of Takayichi that people are going to focus on. Moving on, Disney is still picking up the pieces after temporarily pulling Jimmy Kimmel off air last month. According to independent data release, the decision triggered a wave of cancellations across Disney Plus and Hulu. About 3 million Americans pulled the plug on their Disney Plus subscriptions in September, more than double its usual churn, while Hulu saw over 4 million cancellations. Turn, the dreaded industry term for the percentage of people who

nicks their subscriptions every month, jumped to 8% for Disney Plus and 10% for Hulu. For context, Netflix has been rooted at 2% churn for the last 13 months. But the report from the data provider antenna was not totally negative. There was also a healthy amount of new subscriptions totaling 4.3 million across both platforms. Regardless, Neil, here we are weeks later, still talking about that faithful choice to ditch Kimmel after his comments on Charlie Kirk's murder. Yeah, what surprised a lot of people during that time was that Disney announced that it was raising prices on Disney Plus, Hulu, and across its bundles. So that actually is going to effect today. So you might see your Disney Plus or Hulu bill go up.

The ad-supported Disney Plus plan is going up $2 from $999 to $11.99. The ad-free premium version is going $3 from $5099 to $1899 per month. And so are those bundles with Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN, which is their new streaming service they just released. And maybe some of the increase in subscriptions that you were talking about is related to that new ESPN subscription service that is broadcasting NFL, and obviously the NFL came back in September. But another instance of a social media boycott that made its way to the real world like

Bud Light and Target, these are things that went viral online and actually impacted a business's bottom line as we saw with Disney. And finally, how about this? Kids are much less likely to develop peanut allergies than they used to. A new study out yesterday found that food allergy rates in young children has plummeted within the last decades, which it attributes to a public health campaign that encourages parents to feed peanut products to their babies. The study found that food allergy rates in children under three fell to 0.93% between 2017 and 2020, compared to 1.46% between 2012 and 2015.

That amounts to 60,000 children having avoided peanut allergies. The progress goes back to 2015 when a trial upended decades. of guidance around potentially life-threatening peanut allergies. Previously, it was thought that parents should avoid giving their infants common allergens like peanuts, but that experiment found that by feeding peanuts to babies, you could actually slash their chances of developing an allergy by more than 80%. Shortly after, U.S. Health Authorities formally recommended that parents introduce peanuts to babies starting as early as four months, which contributed to the declines we're seeing today.

I mean, I can't imagine living life with a peanut allergy. I'm a big peanut butter fan. So anything that reduces this, it is, you know, a life-threatening condition for a lot of children. So this is being treated as a massive public health win. When you introduce these allergens through the gut, it just makes you more, you know, have a robust defense against them in adulthood. But it is kind of fits into this larger pattern of modern immunology that we live in a more over-sanitized world. We have limited microbial exposure that sometimes under-trains our immune system. so by introducing some of these allergens into your environment in a controlled way early

on in the right way through the gut, that it does make you a lot more resilient to them going forward. We started with Amazon Outage, Internet Outergen. We end with limited microbial exposure. You get the full range here, folks. Okay. And that is a good way to end it. That's all the time we have.

Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. Have a wonderful Tuesday. You have any feedback on today's episode. Send a note to Morningbrewery at MorningBrew.com. all the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lou is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup still doesn't understand 6-7, but you tried Toby. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Boring Group. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.