Seems like it worked fine. They laid off a quarter of their junior principal engineers, the stock went up. They had a massive outage a few months later, the stock went up again. Everything's working out fine for their strategy so far.
I remember comments saying the stock went up because the average joe didn't realize how much of the internet was powered by AWS until all their day to day apps started failing. To most people Amazon is an online shopping site.
You would think this would eventually show up on the balance sheets, right? Presumably a lot of their big customers have SLAs with money penalties, so maybe next quarter earnings? Or quarter after that?
SLA monetary penalties won't make the difference there. Enough giant customers moving substantial workload off of AWS (either to another cloud, or otherwise) would, but the timeline for that is years, not next quarter.