Every year we as a society embrace more and more technology in our everyday lives, 99% of the time we want and need the technology. This Christmas weekend many will receive or have bought electronic devices. If you own Apple stock that should be a good thing, if you own Nvidia that should be a good thing, and the list goes on. One of the biggest players in the use of the internet is Amazon. On the ground Amazon uses the internet to ensure the packages are delivered to the correct place; over the internet, Amazon’s cloud services or AWS is the dominant player in the space. One of the newer companies looking to join the cloud is the NASDAQ and they have chosen AWS.

In an article by Eva Matthews of Reuters, in the middle of December Amazon’s cloud services AWS was temporarily down. The effect was streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon’s own e-commerce websites and brokerage company Robinhood was down. For Netflix 26% of its traffic was down.

Amazon’s Ring, mobile banking app Chime, vacuum cleaner iRobot all were down because they use AWS.

Fortunately for thousands of people, the AWS system was not down for very long, but if you were using it at the time, as a customer you would feel frustrated.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, more and more of us use the internet all the time and when it works which is very often the service feels almost instantaneous and we expect the service all the time. When the service goes down, our expectations about the time and frustrations go up because of our normal expectations of use of service. Even though the time maybe short, what are your expecting? In our investing, if we buy and stock goes up, well we think it is normal, but in reality all stocks go up and down and most go down. Often times only the best stocks go up over a long period of time, an interesting aspect is to look at the top 20 companies rated by Forbes in 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020. Notice the change.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.