WSJ What’s News - What’s News in Markets: AWS Outage, Warner Plans, Earnings Movers

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

How did Amazon’s stock react to the big internet outage it was behind? And what did investors think of Warner Bros. putting itself up for sale? Plus, what were the notable movers among the myriad of earnings reports? Host Francesca Fontana discusses the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey listeners, it's Saturday, October 25th. I'm Francesca Fontana for the Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News and Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Let's get to it. Overall, we had a relatively sunny week in the stock market. Tech stocks took a hit on Wednesday due to fears of renewed trade tensions between the U.S. and China, but overall, investors seemed to be optimistic about President Trump's upcoming meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, it was a jam-packed week for corporate earnings. We'll dig into some specific earnings reports in a bit, but to put it in perspective, nearly one-fifth of the S&P 500 reported results, including big names like Tesla and Netflix. I can't speak for everyone, but it really feels like this year is flying by. I don't know where the time is going. All in all, the Dow rose 2.2% for the week. the S&P 500 gained 1.9% and the NASDAQ rose 2.3%. Now, don't think I wasn't going to mention the giant internet breakdown that kicked off this week.

No, I put it at the top of my list. Amazon breaks the internet. So a quick rundown, in case you were off the grid this past week, on Monday, a widespread outage linked to Amazon web services cascaded across the web. More than 4,000 flights were delayed, financial trips. transactions were affected. Slack was down, Zoom was down, Venmo, Instacart, news websites like WSJ.com, the list goes on. And it put into stark relief just how fragile our global internet connectivity is. One glitch sending huge ripple effects across corporations and our everyday lives, especially when, for instance, Amazon controls about a third of the public cloud computing market, aka the internet's core infrastructure. By late afternoon on Monday, Amazon

said it had restored much of the service that had been knocked offline. Compared to the crowd strike outage last summer, which sent the company's stock into a total tailspin, I'd say Amazon's stock certainly came out unscathed. Its shares ended more than 1% higher on Monday, and on a weekly basis, Amazon notched a gain of more than 5%. Warner Brothers Discovery debuted some big news this week. The TV and film giant is putting itself up for sale. Warner said it's exploring a potential sale of all or some of its media holdings, setting into motion a deal process that could reshape the future of the entertainment industry.

You may recall that the Wall Street Journal recently reported Warner has received and rebuffed multiple bids from rival Paramount Skydance. Remember, Paramount recently wrapped up a deal of its own, its merger with Skydance. Media dealmaking has been in the air as of late. Paramount also just bet $150 million on a deal to acquire the news and opinion site The Free Press and made co-founder Barry Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. So how did investors react to Warner's announcement? Well, its shares jumped 11% on Tuesday, while Paramount's shares lost 2.8%.

And throughout the week, Warner continued higher, ultimately gaining 16%. while Paramount, even things out, ending less than 1% lower. Last but not least, let's go through some big earnings movers. First up, Netflix. On Tuesday, Netflix reported higher quarterly profit and sales driven by membership growth, price hikes, and increased advertising revenue. But its earnings missed expectations, which Netflix said was due to an expense connected to a Brazilian tax issue.

We certainly don't need to go into the details, but the bottom line, the stock fell 10% on Tuesday and lost 8.7% on a weekly basis. We also had Tesla's report late Wednesday. The takeaway? A surge of electric car demand in the third quarter didn't give Tesla enough of a boost. Its net income fell 37%, even as American shoppers raced to buy EVs before a $7,500 tax credit expired last month. After an after-hour slump, Tesla actually closed up 2.3% on Thursday. day, but the stock notched a weekly decline of 1.3%. And now you know what's news in markets this week.

You can read about more stocks that moved on the week's news in The Score, my column in the Wall Street Journal's Exchange section. Today's show was produced by Zoe Colkin with Deputy Editor Chris Sinsley. I'm Francesca Fontana. Have a great weekend and see you next Saturday. Thank you.