Short answers, pulled from the story.
Amazon.com Web Services launched its first web services in July 2002 under the management of Colin Bryar. By 2004, over one hundred applications were built on top of this initial infrastructure.
Andy Jassy took over the portfolio from Colin Bryar in the summer of 2003 to map out the vision for AWS. The Infrastructure team led by Tom Killalea began operations using commodity Linux hardware, and Simple Queue Service became the first infrastructure service available for public usage in November 2004.
On the 21st of April 2011, parts of the Elastic Block Store service became stuck and could not fulfill read or write requests. It took at least two days for the service to be fully restored after this event.
AWS has distinct operations in 38 geographical regions including nine in North America, nine in Europe, and thirteen in Asia Pacific. Regions introduced after the 20th of March 2019 are considered opt-in regions requiring users to explicitly enable them.
Amazon Web Services was awarded a $600M contract with the CIA in October 2013 and signed a $9 billion contract from the United States Department of Defense in 2022 alongside Google and Microsoft. Spy agencies such as GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 in the UK also contracted AWS to host their classified materials.