Short answers, pulled from the story.
AWS launched its first public web services in July 2002 under the management of Colin Bryar. Its first public infrastructure service was Simple Queue Service (SQS), launched in November 2004, followed by Amazon S3 in March 2006 and EC2 in August 2006.
As of the first quarter of 2023, AWS held 31% of the global cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy Research Group. Its two closest competitors, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, held 25% and 11% respectively.
Andy Jassy is credited as a central figure in founding AWS, taking over the portfolio in the summer of 2003 and mapping out the vision for an "Internet OS" built on foundational infrastructure primitives. Jeff Barr, Allan Vermeulen, Jeff Bezos, and a founding team of 57 employees also played key roles. Jassy was later promoted to CEO of the AWS division in 2016.
The outage was caused by human error during a debugging session, in which more server capacity was removed than intended. This triggered a cascade of failures across connected systems. AWS reported that services were fully restored within five hours and that no data was lost.
AWS reported $17.46 billion in annual revenue in 2017. By the end of 2020, annual revenue had grown to $46 billion.
Project Nimbus is a cloud services contract between AWS, Google, and the Israeli government. Employees and shareholders at both companies condemned it over concerns that the technology would enable surveillance of Palestinians, unlawful data collection, and facilitate the expansion of Israeli settlements. A procurement document listing obligatory customers including two state-owned weapons manufacturers, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, was published in 2021.