CyberCube Estimates $38M to $581M in AWS Outage Losses with Limited Insurance Impact

Cyber risk analytics firm CyberCube has published preliminary loss estimates for the October 20 AWS outage, dubbed ‘Amazonk,’ projecting insured losses between $38 million and $581 million. Despite affecting tens of thousands of businesses globally, the insurance industry is expected to experience only limited exposure, thanks largely to Amazon’s likely reimbursements and the brief duration of the event.

The outage disrupted a wide range of services including popular apps like Snapchat, Fortnite, and Coinbase, as well as enterprise tools such as Atlassian and connected home systems like Ring. CyberCube’s analysis, based on its Portfolio Manager Version 6 platform, suggests more than 2,000 large organizations were directly impacted, with a total footprint nearing 70,000 organizations.

For insurance claims professionals, this incident reinforces the growing importance of cloud service dependency in underwriting and loss modeling. Although the event was geographically centered on AWS’s us-east-1 region, the ripple effect reached across industries and continents, illustrating the systemic risks tied to digital infrastructure.

Still, the swift resolution and potential reimbursements by AWS are expected to deter many policyholders from filing claims. Cyber insurers may see only a low- to mid-single digit loss ratio impact. The incident highlights the effectiveness of cyber risk modeling and aggregation tools in preparing insurers to absorb such disruptions without major surprises.

Claims teams and cyber adjusters should view this as a validation of current modeling frameworks and a cue to scrutinize cloud service reliance in policyholders’ risk profiles. Even minor cloud outages can affect claims frequency, especially in tech-heavy and financial sectors.