CyberCube Puts Insured Loss Estimate From AWS Outage Around $40M

Cyber analytics firm CyberCube said losses from the Amazon Web Services outage could eclipse $580 million.

CyberCube late last week put out a preliminary global insured loss estimate of between $38 million and $581 million for the AWS event, which the company has dubbed “Amazonk.”

Related: Insurance Claims After AWS Outage Won’t be a One-Size-Fits-All Solution

CyberCube previously released a prediction that the Oct. 20 cyber incident would have a moderate impact to insurers. In releasing the loss-estimate range, CyberCube said Amazonk “is expected to have a loss ratio impact for cyber insurers in the low- to mid-single digits.”

“This type of event is something that is modeled, priced for, and underwritten, and is well within insurers’ expectations,” CyberCube said.

Related: AWS Outage a ‘Moderate Incident,’ Another Near Miss for Insurance Industry

Most likely, losses for the insurance industry will fall toward the lower end of the range, but the higher end accounts for additional information that could come to light, CyberCube said.

The outage affected more than 2,000 large organizations and nearly 70,000 organizations in total, said the firm. Among the high profile companies that reported varying degrees of disruption from the outage were McDonald’s, Zoom Communications, Salesforce, Venmo, Apple, Snapchat, Epic Games, and some Amazon services such as Ring.

CyberCube added that it expects AWS “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.”