Cloudfront, by Amazon's own admission, specialises in high bandwidth delivery (ie huge videos). Fastly has consistently better performance as a small object cache, which makes it the choice for web assets

https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...

Fastly gives them the edge performance they need without having to build it themselves. They have been a customer for a while I think.

But they have competing products through AWS.

I imagine it works well for the whole business that they allow product teams to use the best cloud tools for the job rather than requiring them to use AWS for everything. If AWS is forced to compete even for Amazon.com's custom, that should make the whole company more resilient to long term technical stagnation.

AWS Route53 and Cloudfront are direct competitors to Fastly.

That's how good Fastly is. Outside of this issue it's a great service.

Yeah, this is what makes me feel this is more an AWS thing

The m.media-amazon.com domain (and a few other CDN'd domains that they use) are running through Fastly:

    nslookup m.media-amazon.com
    
    Name:  media.amazon.map.fastly.net

It is very interesting that they are not using CloudFront!

really, m.media-amazon.com seems to have a very short TTL (showing 37 seconds right now) and has been weighted to cloudfront now.

Amazon is also known to use Akamai. Sure, Amazon relies heavily on AWS, but why should it surprise anyone that a retail website obsessed with instant loading of pages decides to use non-AWS CDNs if the performance is better.

Even if CloudFront became the default, I'm certain amazon.com would keep contracts with fastly and akamai just so they can weight traffic away from CloudFront in an outage.

Good to have 3rd party redundancy, time to fail over to something else now I'd think though.

They already have:

  $ host m.media-amazon.com
  m.media-amazon.com is an alias for c.media-amazon.com.
  c.media-amazon.com has address 99.86.119.84

(which is a Cloudfront IP)

Yep they did exactly this and are now running on cloudfront

Why?

looks like amazon.com started using fastly in May 2020 (https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2020/05/fastly-amazon-hom...) so it's not an AWS thing

AWS is reporting no issues across the regions:

https://status.aws.amazon.com

AWS is almost never reporting issues on this page.

AWS don't report outages until it's undoubtedly them.

Fastly deploy their own hardware, (That's one of their selling points) I don't think they rely much on AWS, maybe just for network interconnection?

Fastly doesn't run on AWS.

It sure looks like a AWS error, even Amazon.com is mostly down.