The internet has a funny sense of humour.
Yesterday I published yet another post about Amazon’s failures—naming names, quoting their managers, and pointing out how their “customer-centric” culture looks very different when you’re actually a customer.
And wouldn’t you know it? My website, vietleadershipcoach.com, went down. Not my other sites. Not my hosting provider. Just the one where I’ve been chronicling Amazon’s Kafkaesque support carousel.
Now, friends of mine who know the underbelly of the web tell me it was probably “just some Russian kiddie” running a botnet for kicks. That’s the most likely truth: random opportunistic vandalism.
But let’s be honest—when your site goes dark within hours of publishing something that makes a $1.9 trillion company look incompetent, it raises an eyebrow or two.
Coincidence or consequence? You tell me.
And here’s the kicker: the irony is that Amazon sells cybersecurity services. They flog AI-powered tools that claim to detect sentiment, monitor risks, and protect customers. If their own executives are watching the dashboards light up red every time my emails and posts hit the wire, I can’t imagine it makes for a comfortable morning report.
So whether this was a bored teenager in Omsk or a convenient little “technical hiccup” elsewhere, the effect is the same: silence the story, if only until the morning meeting is over.
But here’s the thing about silence—it never lasts. The posts live on LinkedIn. They live on Substack. They live on Wayback Machine. They live in screenshots and archives and the inboxes of every Amazon manager I’ve cc’d.
If this was coincidence, it’s funny timing. If it was consequence, it’s clumsy. Either way, I’m not going away.
Amazon likes to talk about resilience. So do veterans like me. The difference is, I mean it.
