Larry Ellison boasted that Oracle's cloud 'never, ever goes down' days after Amazon's crippling AWS outage

larry ellison oracle smiling — Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder of Oracle
Reuters/Robert Galbraith

Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison subtly dissed Amazon in a recent earnings call.
The exec said a major client told Oracle the web hosting service "never ever goes down."
Amazon caused major disruptions this week after AWS systems went down for hours.

Oracle's chairman of the board Larry Ellison said subtly dissed Amazon after an AWS system outage caused major disruptions this week.

On a call with investors Thursday, Ellison, the billionaire who cofounded enterprise software company Oracle, recalled a conversation he had with a "large telecommunications company" that said Oracle stands out from competitors because the cloud "never ever goes down." The client uses Oracle, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft cloud computing services, according to Ellison.

"We can't say that about any of the other clouds," Ellison said, in reference to the telecommunication client's note. "We think this is a critical differentiator availability."

Ellison's comments come days after a major outage to Amazon Web Services, which left users unable to access Netflix, Disney+, and Ring smart-home systems that store data in AWS. Some Ring users said the outage resulted in stolen packages and disruptions in home security.

Leaked documents reviewed by Insider show Amazon blaming the outage to a sudden burst in traffic that caused congestion across multiple devices at Amazon's biggest region for data centers.

Ellison said while competitors like Amazon build a small number of large data centers, Oracle's strategy is to build a large number of smaller, less expensive data centers. Oracle's strategy improves reliability, Ellison said, because one data center going down will not result in the widespread outage Amazon experienced.

Ellison added Oracle chooses not to have every service Amazon offers to focus on: "We are not going to try to feature match every single thing they do."

Oracle reported a 6% increase in quarterly revenue on Thursday due to continued growth in cloud-computing software systems as more companies shift to remote work during the pandemic. But the company reported a net loss of $1.25 billion compared to last quarter due to a payments in a dispute with former CEO Mark Hurd.

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