An AWS outage on October 26 impacted major services like Netflix, Starbucks, and United Airlines due to a glitch between two automated systems attempting simultaneous updates on a DNS entry. Angelique Medina from Cisco’s ThousandEyes explained the issue as a broken “phone book,” leading to service denial. Amazon acknowledged the incident's significant effects and pledged to improve system resilience while addressing the underlying “race condition scenario.” Indranil Gupta emphasized the importance of effective communication during such outages.