Amazon Web Services outage: Here’s how much companies may have lost due to the global disruption that lasted for hours

AWS

A prolonged disruption in one of Amazon Web Services’ major regions caused failures across a large set of public-facing and enterprise systems. Reports filed to outage-tracking platforms exceeded several million, reflecting interruption across shopping, financial services, aviation operations, collaboration suites, games, and online productivity tools. Internet-performance firms that monitor uptime say the economic damage from the episode is likely to be very large once stalled transactions and lost work-hours are counted.

This failure sits in a familiar lineage. Earlier AWS-linked disruptions — including the 2024 event in which a third-party software update triggered cascading outages across cloud tenants, and the 2021 US-EAST-1 incident that briefly froze e-commerce checkout flows and logistics routing — showed how interruption in a concentrated region can ripple globally. The current case again originated in US-EAST-1, the region that houses a dense share of legacy workloads and remains tightly coupled to many higher-level services.

Outage monitors recorded problems from firms spanning banking, ticketing, consumer apps, developer tooling, airline tech stacks, gaming networks, and AI products. Among the high-traffic properties that rely on AWS are Amazon retail, Snapchat, Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Canva, Slack and Reddit. Independent cost modellers have previously estimated that large-audience sites can forfeit tens of millions of dollars for each hour in which their core flows are unreachable.

Those benchmarks imply material exposure when the downtime stretches over hours at global services. Earlier cost studies have placed Amazon retail’s potential hourly loss in the tens of millions of dollars, and other affected platforms in the hundreds of thousands to low millions per hour. Extending the arithmetic to more than a thousand firms — and adding the productivity shock from workers unable to access cloud-hosted tools — pushes the combined loss into the billions.