UPDATED 30.10.2025
Sarah Ouarbya, Insurance Partner, Forvis Mazars comments:
“The recent AWS outage is a stark reminder of just how dependent the insurance and wider financial services sectors have become on a handful of technology providers. When a single cloud failure can interrupt banking apps, tax systems and insurers’ digital services all at once, it stops being a technology issue and becomes one of operational resilience. For insurers, this incident highlights why the new UK Critical Third Parties regime matters. It’s designed to make sure firms understand and test the resilience of their most important service providers and not just their own systems. That means knowing where the real points of dependency lie, asking tougher questions of cloud and data partners, and having credible contingency plans in place.
“The preliminary insured loss estimate for the AWS outage has been reported to be between $38 million and $581 million. This means insurers face a dual impact: the cost of claims resulting from the outage and the disruption to their own operations.
“The insurers who emerge strongest will be those that treat resilience not merely as a compliance requirement, but as a competitive and reputational asset. As underwriting conditions continue to soften and competitive pressures mount, demonstrating a well-considered and proactive approach to operational resilience will become a key litmus test of trust among clients, counterparties, and supervisory authorities.
“This is particularly timely as regulators prepare to designate the first Critical Third Parties, events like the AWS outage become case-studies for the risk-chains that the regime is designed to catch. For an insurer that can demonstrate through public commentary, board oversight, and vendor governance that it has robustness built into its third-party relationships (not just its own systems) there is an opportunity to build trust and credibility. In short, operational resilience is fast becoming a key differentiator.”
AWS services have suffered a major outage today, which has no doubt impacted many insurance brands who run their systems on AWS platforms. Here is some comment we found, plus we checked in with a few of the affected sites and services.
UPDATED 23.10.2025
“The ongoing fallout from the AWS outage, that hit over 1,000 companies and millions of users, shows just how far-reaching cyber incidents can be.
“Whilst this incident appears to have been due to a common occurrence – a Domain Name System (DNS) error – it’s a stark reminder that almost every business, regardless of size or sector, depends on digital services at its core. That dependence is a vulnerability that must be prioritised to insure against the potentially huge knock-on effects of cyber outages.
“As with most insurance products, you see the real value in the event of a claim, no more so than cyber incidents. Businesses affected by these issues often face disruption to normal working conditions at the least, with uncertainty of when systems can return to normal, through to the change of significant financial and reputational loss impacting the confidence of customers, suppliers, investors, and other key stakeholders.”
UPDATED 21.10.2025
Vonny Gamot, Head of EMEA at online protection company McAfee: “AWS’ massive outage reminds us just how interconnected our digital world has become. When a single service like Amazon Web Services goes down, it’s not just businesses that feel the impact, it’s consumers trying to access everyday essentials like banking apps, emergency services, or even their favorite platforms like Fortnite and Snapchat. The complexity of our shared cloud infrastructure means a glitch in one system can send shockwaves across the internet. But outages like this aren’t just inconvenient, they can be risky. Cybercriminals thrive in the confusion, exploiting the moment with fake support scams, phishing emails, and malicious links posing as fixes.”
CLOUDFLARE COMMENTS ON BBC
Matthew Prince’s business Cloudflare uses cloud-based software to help websites and apps connect. Speaking to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4, Prince says that although there are “amazing things” about relying on cloud sharing technology, “if you have an outage like this it can take down a lot of services we rely on.
“Some of the companies were able to stay online, but that comes with complexity and cost and not everyone makes those decisions,” he adds.
Ultimately though, Prince says, today’s Amazon outage “is not a big deal”.
Instead, the tech boss says he’s worried about “governments intentionally taking the internet offline”.
“If that gets normalised that’s a bigger risk to the internet,” he explains.
KINGS COLLEGE LONDON
Dr Tuncdogan – a Reader in Digital Innovation – said:
“This doesn’t appear to be a cyber attack but a glitch – similar to last year’s CrowdStrike outage. The impact is similar and exposes a critical single point of failure. If a comparable vulnerability were deliberately targeted by malicious actors, the damage would be far worse.
“The deeper issue is tech monoculture. We are building global infrastructure with very little diversity in platforms or providers. That’s why we are seeing systemic failures: Amazon Web Services now, a multi-airport outage a few weeks ago, CrowdStrike last year. It’s like agricultural monoculture – when everything relies on a single strain, one disease can wipe out entire plantations, because they all have the same genetics.
“We need to diversify our technology infrastructure. Customers can design redundancy (i.e., systems that come online when something goes wrong) using on-premise failover or alternative providers. However, this can also be achieved by the providers themselves, such as by developing different competing infrastructures within their ecosystems.
“This incident will likely be resolved quickly. However, unless we rethink the architecture (that is, we decentralise and diversify), we should expect more outages of this scale, whether from glitches or targeted attacks.”
LLOYDS BANK GROUP
Lloyds Bank sites appear to back online and working normally.
UK GOV GATEWAY
IE just tested this site and it seems normal.
APPLE MUSIC – DENIED
Just tried a test purchase and – computer says no.
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