Devika Narayan

🚨My paper on cloud infrastructure, expansion, and platform capitalism! What explains the rapid expansion and scaling of platforms and platform economies? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03…

Amazon had four Sev-1 outages (their highest severity level) in a single week. Internal memos say AI-assisted code changes were a contributing factor. The timeline here is wild. In October 2025, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees. In January 2026, another 16,000. That’s about 30,000 people in five months, roughly 10% of the corporate workforce. CEO Andy Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI. During those same months, Amazon set a target: 80% of developers using AI coding tools at least once a week. They tracked adoption closely and blocked rival tools like OpenAI’s Codex. Even so, 30% of developers still hadn’t touched Amazon’s in-house tool Kiro by January. In December 2025, Kiro caused a 13-hour AWS outage. The AI tool had production-level permissions and decided the best fix for a bug was to delete and recreate an entire live environment. A second incident involved Amazon Q Developer, another AI tool. Amazon blamed both on “user error, not AI.” But quietly added mandatory peer review for all production access afterward. Then March 5: Amazon’s retail site went down for about six hours. Over 22,000 users reported checkout failures, missing prices, and app crashes. Amazon called it a “software code deployment” error. Five days later, SVP Dave Treadwell made the normally optional weekly engineering meeting mandatory. His memo acknowledged “GenAI tools supplementing or accelerating production change instructions, leading to unsafe practices.” These problems trace back to Q3 2025. Amazon’s own assessment: their GenAI safeguards “are not yet fully established.” The new rule: junior and mid-level engineers now need senior sign-off on any AI-assisted production changes. Treadwell also announced “controlled friction” for the most critical parts of the retail experience. For context, Google’s 2025 DORA report found 90% of developers use AI for coding but only 24% trust it “a lot.” An Uplevel study of 800 developers found Copilot users introduced 41% more bugs with no improvement in output. Amazon is finding out what those numbers look like at the scale of a $500 Billion revenue company, with 30,000 fewer people on staff to catch the mistakes.

oh BOOHOO

I have a paper out - it is about the capitalist dynamics cloud infrastructure is entangled in. How cloud infra speaks to the fundamental contradiction between 'fixity and motion' and in doing so intensifies dynamism. doi.org/10.1080/019722…

@gavinmuellerphd -35C with windchill.

YES!

I am giving a talk today at Cambridge! polis.cam.ac.uk/events/polis-p… Still out here talking about cloud infrastructure, the contradictions it acts as a fix for, and the new ones it activates. Thanks to @IliasAlami and Pedro Mendes Loureiro.

In the September issue! On how to tell supply chain histories. Specifically, the story of india's IT industy and where it came from. academic.oup.com/joeg/article/2…

Schrodinger’s case.

📣🚨NEW: ☁️ Big Cloud—Google, Microsoft & Amazon—control two thirds of the cloud market. They’re getting rich off the AI gold rush. In work with Nathan Kim, we show how Big Cloud is expanding their empire by scrutinizing their *investments*… 🧵 📄PDF: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5…

Reading 1980 lit on large technical systems and loving it.

GREAT WORK LADIES

I think Critical legal accounts need a concept of latency - the way laws and policing tactics sit in the background for a long time and then get applied for ever more draconian and exceptional purposes: bbc.com/news/articles/…

Quite the all stars economic geography panel to celebrate @outtaKimbo's new book! Neil Brenner, Nik Theodore, Devika Narayan, Shaina Potts, Christian Berndt, and Eric Sheppard #AAG2025

Tomorrow 10ish am!

Thrilled to have this opportunity to talk about scalable computing and capitalist dynamics at AAG next week!

Has anyone here written about the history of DevOps? I am writing about it at the moment (briefly) and looking for stuff.

Excited to have Fabian Muniesa, @_paullangley and @bshestakofsky present their work as part of a Symposium on Speculative Finance and Digital Futures. Today and tomorrow art 2pm (UK), in Bristol and online!

@matthewarcher5 Thanks so much!

@tom_swing Ah thanks, Alex!

@Devika__narayan Wow amazing. Congratulations

I have a paper out! It's about how we tell supply chain histories. It's also about how software work came to be offshored. Check it out if you're interested in production networks, economic globalisation, computing history, or conjunctural analysis academic.oup.com/joeg/advance-a…