Cloud Outage Analysis
AWS Outage Cost - History, Real Losses & Your Exposure
Updated April 2026 · 9 major incidents documented
Dec 2021 7-hour outage
$150M+
Aggregate customer loss est.
S3 2017 4-hour outage
$150M+
Affected large portion of internet
Major incident frequency
~1-2/yr
Significant incidents 2017-2025
AWS Outage History
| Date | Region | Services | Duration | Impact | Est. Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2025 | Multiple | EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS | ~15 hours | ~4M users affected | $40M+ est. |
| Nov 2023 | us-east-1 | CloudFront, Route53 | ~4 hours | Global CDN degradation | $20M+ est. |
| Dec 2021 | us-east-1 | EC2, ECS, Lambda, SNS | ~7 hours | Major global disruption | $150M+ est. |
| Jun 2021 | us-east-1 | EC2, VPC networking | ~4 hours | Significant EC2 impact | $30M+ est. |
| Nov 2020 | us-east-1 | Kinesis (cascading) | ~13 hours | Cascaded to IAM, Cognito, CloudWatch | $50M+ est. |
| Aug 2019 | us-east-1 | EC2, ELB | ~8 hours | Multiple East Coast services | $25M+ est. |
| Mar 2019 | us-east-1 | EC2, VPC | ~4 hours | Network connectivity issues | $15M+ est. |
| Feb 2017 | us-east-1 | S3 | ~4 hours | Significant internet-wide disruption | $150M+ est. |
| Jun 2012 | us-east-1 | EC2, RDS, EBS | ~8 hours | Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest affected | $100M+ est. |
Cost estimates are aggregate customer losses. AWS does not disclose customer impact figures. Estimates based on analyst reports and revenue-at-risk modeling. Updated April 2026.
AWS SLA Credit Rules
| Service | SLA % | Credit (99%-99.99%) | Credit (<99%) | Claim Window |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC2 | 99.99% | 10% of monthly fee | 30% of monthly fee | 30 days |
| S3 | 99.99% | 10% | 25% | 30 days |
| RDS Multi-AZ | 99.95% | 10% | 30% | 30 days |
| Lambda | 99.95% | 10% | 30% | 30 days |
Credits applied to future invoices. Business or Enterprise support required. Full SLA credit asymmetry analysis.
Frequently Asked
How much does an AWS outage cost businesses?
AWS outage costs depend on your revenue and architecture. The December 2021 us-east-1 outage lasted ~7 hours and caused aggregate customer losses estimated at $150M+. A business running $100K/day on AWS-dependent revenue would lose $29,167/hr during a total outage. Multi-AZ architecture reduces exposure by 60-80% for most failure modes.
Why does us-east-1 have so many outages?
us-east-1 is AWS's original and largest region with the most complex dependencies. It affects more customers when it fails. AWS's control plane and many managed services have us-east-1 dependencies even when deployed in other regions.
What is the AWS SLA credit for an outage?
AWS SLA credits are 10% of your monthly bill for the affected service when monthly uptime falls below 99.99%, and 30% when below 99%. A $1,000/month EC2 spend during a month with a 7-hour outage receives $100-$300 in SLA credit - not related to your revenue loss.