AWS outage: How much companies may have lost after disruption
What's the story
A major outage in one of Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s core regions caused widespread failures at thousands of companies globally. The disruption affected a wide range of services, including shopping, financial services, aviation operations, collaboration suites, games, and online productivity tools. Internet performance firms that track uptime suggest the economic damage from this incident is likely to be massive once stalled transactions and lost work hours are taken into account.
Historical context
AWS outages and their historical significance
The current AWS outage is reminiscent of previous incidents, such as the 2024 disruption caused by a third-party software update that triggered cascading outages across cloud tenants. In 2021, a similar incident briefly froze e-commerce checkout flows and logistics routing. These past events have shown how interruptions in concentrated regions can have global ramifications.
Impact assessment
Companies affected by the AWS outage
The recent AWS outage has impacted a wide range of sectors, including banking, ticketing, consumer apps, developer tooling, airline tech stacks, gaming networks, and AI products. High-traffic properties that rely on AWS include Amazon retail, Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, Slack, and Reddit. Independent cost modelers have previously estimated that large-audience sites can lose tens of millions of dollars for every hour their core flows are unreachable.
Financial impact
Estimated hourly losses for companies
The estimated hourly losses for some of the companies affected by the AWS outage are as follows: Amazon: $72,831,050; Snapchat: $611,986; Zoom: $532,580; Roblox: $411,187; Fortnite: $399,543; Canva: $342,466; Slack: $194,064; and Reddit: $148,402. These figures highlight how much these companies could potentially lose due to the disruption in AWS services.