Preliminary estimates suggest that insured losses from this week’s Amazon Web Services outage could range between £29m and £436m.

Analytics firm CyberCube says the event is expected to have a loss-ratio impact for cyber insurers in the low to mid-single digits, reflecting only a moderate insurance impact.

The estimate was published in a second Security Incident Report following the 20th October outage, which disrupted platforms including Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox, Atlassian, Coinbase, Venmo and Ring.

CyberCube’s analysis, using its Portfolio Manager, suggests the outage likely affected more than 2,000 large organisations and possibly 70,000 in total.

The analysis states: “In terms of industry effects, we see those that depend on high availability being the most affected, including technology and financial services firms. While the majority of AWS’s US-East-1 customers sit in the US, the effects were certainly felt by companies domiciled in the UK, Europe and elsewhere, given the critical role that US-East-1 plays in AWS’s entire cloud infrastructure.

“We expect AWS will act to reimburse companies for downtime and to avoid lawsuits. In light of the short duration of the event, companies may decide it is not worth the hassle to claim. These considerations would point more in the direction of our low estimate.”

CyberCube said the outage, which lasted about 15 hours and centred on AWS’s US-East-1 region, was well within insurers’ expectations. The event underlines the industry’s growing focus on cloud concentration and systemic dependency risks.

The considerable range of £29m to £436m reflects preliminary estimates, with most potential outcomes expected near the lower end, while the upper figure allows for uncertainty in downstream impacts.

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