Amazon’s wild ride

Despite a disastrous malfunction of its cloud computing network and a disappointing quarterly earnings report in April, Amazon Inc. continues to amaze market analysts as the price of its stock reaches all-time highs.

Serious trouble arose for the company on April 21 when an outage at an East Coast Amazon data center caused service disruptions for popular internet sites such as Quora, Reddit, Foursquare and Hootsuite, which use Amazon Web Services to host their sites. The outage lasted several days and sparked criticism because of Amazons communication during the situation.

Less than a week later, the company released a disappointing earnings report. Despite an increase in net sales of 38 percent, Amazons profits fell by 33 percent and operating expenses rose by nearly $3 billion. Shortly after the announcement, shares of the company fell by 2.5 percent to $177.77. Since that low point, though, the stock has climbed sharply in value. The share price shot above $200 Monday and reached levels unseen in 10 years. One of the factors likely behind the dizzying growth is a number of technological innovations unveiled by the company over the past several months, including a personal music cloud and storage drive, a lower- priced version of Kindle with sponsored content, instant videos for Amazon Prime users and an expanded array of Amazon products internationally.

Most recently, Amazon slashed the prices of popular music in its store to 69 cents in an obvious bid to challenge the dominance of Apples iTunes music store. The company also appears to have invested in future development by adding 4,200 new employees over the past three months. Those additions cap off a year of intense growth as the companys workforce ballooned by 45 percent to 37,900 employees.

In spite of Aprils bad news, the company has heavily invested in the future and openly challenged industry rivals. Wall Street investors seem to believe the companys best days lie ahead.