aacj

Top 5 US news stories

October 21 2025

Greg Loving

21 Oct 2025 • 7 min read

EMIL LENDOF/WSJ

Obscure Amazon Glitch Cripples Web Services for Millions

Major Amazon Failure Highlights Fragility of Global Cloud Reliance

Amazon Bets on Automation to Avoid Hiring Hundreds of Thousands

Altman’s Dealmaking Makes OpenAI ‘Too Big to Fail’

Blue Jays to Face Defending Champion Dodgers in World Series

…US GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN ENTERS 21st DAY…

1. Obscure Amazon Glitch Cripples Web Services for Millions

A glitch with an obscure Amazon database disrupted life for millions of people across the U.S. as core internet services failed to function for an array of companies. Alexa devices couldn’t hear. Corporate Slack messages wouldn’t post. Students couldn’t turn in assignments or access materials from courses. Financial trades were impossible on certain platforms. Users of Zoom, Venmo, Instacart and a host of other services faced prolonged outages that rippled through homes and businesses. The trouble started a few hours after midnight on the East Coast. A minor update to what’s called the Domain Name System—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash. DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services product that has become one of the world’s most important databases. Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.

WSJ

2. Major Amazon Failure Highlights Fragility of Global Cloud Reliance

At around 2 a.m. on Monday morning, the systems that help Amazon sort packages onto trucks and guide drivers on the road went down, according to an internal message viewed by The Wall Street Journal. By 3 a.m., the outage’s blast radius had spread far beyond Amazon, cascading across the internet, delaying more than 4,000 flights, knocking out news websites such as The Wall Street Journal, affecting financial transactions and extending into everyday life. The episode, which turned into one of the most prolonged daily outages for Amazon Web Services, offered a reminder of the fragility of global connectivity, which has gone dark a number of times in recent years after seemingly minor software updates. By late afternoon Monday, Amazon said it had restored much of the service that had been knocked offline. “Even if just briefly, major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at research firm eMarketer. “As cloud reliance and workloads expand, these outages could hit industries harder.” Amazon controls about a third of the public cloud-computing market, the core infrastructure of the modern internet. While it is too soon to have a complete understanding of the cost of the outage, other companies have faced multimillion-dollar claims and lawsuits when their services were at the root of global disruptions. Last year, a software patch from CrowdStrike knocked nearly 10 million computers offline, affecting hospitals, restaurants, media companies and beyond. Although the acute impact from that event was related to laptops using Microsoft software that were rendered unusable, the cloud also played a role. Digital-disruption insurance provider Parametrix said the CrowdStrike event caused $5.4 billion in losses for the Fortune 500, excluding Microsoft.

WSJ

3. Amazon Bets on Automation to Avoid Hiring Hundreds of Thousands

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees. Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots. Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

NYT

4. Altman’s Dealmaking Makes OpenAI ‘Too Big to Fail’

To achieve his vision of securing seemingly endless computing power for OpenAI, Altman has gone on a dealmaking blitz, playing the egos of Silicon Valley’s giants off one another as they race to cash in on OpenAI’s future growth. The resulting game of financial one-upmanship has tied the fates of the world’s biggest semiconductor and cloud companies—and vast swaths of the U.S. economy—to OpenAI, essentially making it too big to fail. All of them are now betting on the success of a startup that is nowhere near turning a profit and facing a mounting list of business challenges. Investors aren’t bothered. On four separate days over the past two months, the stock prices of Oracle, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Broadcom soared after they disclosed OpenAI-related deals—adding a combined $630 billion to their market value in the first day of trading after the announcements. A broader rally in tech stocks followed each time, helping lift the U.S. stock market to record highs.

WSJ

5. Blue Jays to Face Defending Champion Dodgers in World Series

On the American League side is the Toronto Blue Jays, a franchise established in 1977 that has attained moderate success since then. The Blue Jays won back-to-back World Series in 1992 and 1993 but had not returned to the Fall Classic until now. They punched their ticket on Monday night, when George Springer’s dramatic three-run homer powered a 4-3 victory over the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the ALCS. On the National League side, the Los Angeles Dodgers are not just the standard bearers of the circuit, but the model for all of baseball. They are the first champions since the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies to successfully earn the right to defend their title the following year. The Dodgers seek to be the first team to repeat since the 2000 New York Yankees, whose title gave the franchise a three-peat.

NYT

All times ET. Subject to change.

Game 1, Friday: at Toronto, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)
Game 2, Saturday: at Toronto, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)
Game 3, Monday: at Los Angeles, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)
Game 4, Tuesday: at Los Angeles, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)
Game 5*, Wednesday: at Los Angeles, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)
Game 6*, Friday, Oct. 31: at Toronto, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)
Game 7*, Saturday, Nov. 1: at Toronto, 8 p.m. ET (Fox/Fox Deportes)

* – if necessary

October 21 1867: Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed. The talks, attended by more than 5,000 prominent chiefs and warriors.

The Medicine Lodge Treaty is the overall name for three treaties signed near Medicine Lodge, Kansas, between the Federal government of the United States and southern Plains Indian tribes in October 1867, intended to bring peace to the area by relocating the Native Americans to reservations in Indian Territory and away from European-American settlement. The gathering was one of the largest of Native American leaders for treaty negotiations in US history.

The U.S. government and tribal chiefs met at a place traditional for Native American ceremonies, at their request.

We are temporarily pausing our podcasts as we revamp our app so any article can be read as audio

Found a mistake? Have a news tip or feedback to share? Contact our newsroom using the button below:

citizen journal offers three flagship products: a daily national news summary, a daily Kansas news summary, and local news and school board summaries from 25 cities across 5 states. Use the links in the header to navigate to national, kansas, and local coverage. Subscribe to each, some, or all to get an email when new issues are published for FREE!