Fox Business alert. I know a lot of you have been affected by this AWS situation. New updates from Amazon Web Services about its massive overnight outage. Amazon's cloud infrastructure unit first saw outages just after 3 a.m. Eastern time in its main U.S. East One region, which is hosted in Northern Virginia. By 6:30 a.m. Eastern, AWS confirmed the issue had been, quote, fully mitigated with most services back online. An hour and a half ago, its internal subsystems are showing early signs of recovering in a few of the availability zones that the U.S. East region — they do expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside, but some companies are still reporting problems. Among them, Coinbase. Problems that included Amazon, Disney+, Lyft, Robinhood, Snapchat, T-Mobile, Venmo, Verizon, United Airlines, and anybody else. Coinbase, AWS client, facing outages. Posting an update on X just an hour ago writing, quote, we are aware that customers are unable to use many core functions of Coinbase such as trading and transfers due to ongoing issues with AWS. We will continue to investigate and provide updates here. The stock of Amazon had been down premarket, it is up now about 1%. But when the cloud goes down like that, no matter the reason, businesses are left scrambling. No one knows that more than Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, who does exactly what we all need him to do, and that is protect people from this. He joins me live in studio. Okta has some partnerships with AWS. What can you tell us regarding this?
These critical services are absolute infrastructure for our modern world, and redundancy has to be built in. Companies that are partnering with AWS — Okta's one of them — we make sure we have redundant systems so even when there is an issue, we can stay robust, secure, and reliable. People think about us as identity infrastructure. We power many of the apps people use every day from the identity perspective. It has to be solid, it has to be up, it has to be reliable.
It sure is nice for you not to be the one everybody's calling and saying why is this down. It just shows how vulnerable. My son, who's a student in college on the West Coast, called and said, Mom, I'm having trouble with some of this. It's affecting quite a few people. Let's talk about how the systems are working now. You have redundancies. That's expensive, but what's worse, the cost of that or the cost of what's happening with AWS?
You have to invest, and you have to invest for many years. It becomes a cultural thing when you build a company that's providing critical infrastructure. You have to do it in how you support people when there is an issue, how you give them timely updates about the status of things. You see regular status updates rolling out anytime there is an issue. I think in some ways technical issues are inevitable. It's about how we respond to them and how we put double layers in place to make sure that the impact is minimal as possible.
The systems overall are very stressed on any given day. On a bright, blue-sky type of day. Right now we're watching AI infect a lot of the issues that we're talking about and what you have to deal with. Can you tell us some of the newest forms of, I guess, stealing people's credentials through AI? Because this is very worrisome. They are mimicking people, and they're also shaking out people's credentials through the chatbots that many of us are now using. How so?
Well, I think everyone sees the potential in AI today. You use ChatGPT, Gemini, and they see the amazing amount of resource they can provide us. The latest trend is AI agents, which basically means connecting many accounts up to the chatbots so they can take action on your behalf, access the systems, provide better responses to you so they have the context of the information you're used to dealing with.
These are digital twins, by the way, and you can input all your information and suddenly your life is easier, except that that's what the bad guys have figured out.
You want an AI agent to book travel for you. You give it access to your calendar, your credit card, so forth. It goes around various travel sites and books a trip for you. And the exploit that can be taken advantage of is now this agent can be tricked into doing things maybe you wouldn't have done. And that's why it's so important for both consumers and businesses to have complete visibility into these connections as they're made. One of the biggest challenges today, especially in the enterprise context, is that companies don't know how these systems are connected. They don't know how the agents connect to the back-end systems, which customer data is accessible. And what we're trying to do at Okta is give them a complete infrastructure, a cloud security fabric that brings these connections to the surface and makes everyone — these connections to the surface and makes everyone aware so IT and security teams can make sure it's secure.
Yes, it is annoying to have to do multifactor verification, but you would say what to somebody who says they don't want to do that anymore?
We can make it easier as an industry. You can use biometrics, your fingerprint or a Face ID on your iPhone to get you in seamlessly. I think we have to continuously be striving to make it more seamless, and I think we can strike this magic balance between making it secure and easy.
