They do have contracts and are obligated to provide a certain “up time”, which is usually 99% or so. If they fail to provide that, they are liable to compensate for the losses.
Or do you think that Amazon is above the law and no other company could sue them?
It all depends on what kind of contracts they have.
These contracts do not stipulate reimbursement for lost revenue. The “uptime guarantee” just gets you a partial discount or service refund for the impacted services.
It is on the customer to architect their environment for high availability (use multiple regions or even multiple hyperscalers, depending on the uptime need).
Source: I work at an enterprise that is bound by one of these agreements (although not with AWS).
SLA contracts can have a plethora of stipulations, including fines and damages for missing SLO. It really depends on how big and important the customer is. For example, you can imagine government contracts probably include hefty fines for causing downtime or data loss, although I am not involved with or familiar with public sector/ government contracts or their terms.
You can imagine that a customer that is big enough to contract a cloud provider to build new locations and install a bunch of new hardware just for them, would also be big enough to leverage contract terms that include fines and compensation for extended downtime or missing SLO.
I work at a data center for a major cloud provider, also not AWS
Much of this stuff is automatic - I’ve worked with such contracted services where uptime is guaranteed. The contracts dictate the terms and conditions for refunds, we see them on a monthly basis when uptime is missed and it’s not done by a person.
I imagine many companies have already seen refunds for outage time, and Amazon scrambled to stop the automation around this.
They’ll have little to stand on in court for something this visible and extensive, and could easily lose their shirt with fines and penalties when a big company sues over breech when they choose to not renew.
Just cause they’re big doesn’t mean all their clients are small or don’t have legal teams of their own.
Good luck arguing that a missed config counts as an ‘unforeseen issue’. If they go that route, people will be all over them for not being SOC compliant wrt change control.
They do have contracts and are obligated to provide a certain “up time”, which is usually 99% or so. If they fail to provide that, they are liable to compensate for the losses.
Or do you think that Amazon is above the law and no other company could sue them?
It all depends on what kind of contracts they have.
These contracts do not stipulate reimbursement for lost revenue. The “uptime guarantee” just gets you a partial discount or service refund for the impacted services.
It is on the customer to architect their environment for high availability (use multiple regions or even multiple hyperscalers, depending on the uptime need).
Source: I work at an enterprise that is bound by one of these agreements (although not with AWS).
SLA contracts can have a plethora of stipulations, including fines and damages for missing SLO. It really depends on how big and important the customer is. For example, you can imagine government contracts probably include hefty fines for causing downtime or data loss, although I am not involved with or familiar with public sector/ government contracts or their terms.
You can imagine that a customer that is big enough to contract a cloud provider to build new locations and install a bunch of new hardware just for them, would also be big enough to leverage contract terms that include fines and compensation for extended downtime or missing SLO.
I work at a data center for a major cloud provider, also not AWS
Much of this stuff is automatic - I’ve worked with such contracted services where uptime is guaranteed. The contracts dictate the terms and conditions for refunds, we see them on a monthly basis when uptime is missed and it’s not done by a person.
I imagine many companies have already seen refunds for outage time, and Amazon scrambled to stop the automation around this.
They’ll have little to stand on in court for something this visible and extensive, and could easily lose their shirt with fines and penalties when a big company sues over breech when they choose to not renew.
Just cause they’re big doesn’t mean all their clients are small or don’t have legal teams of their own.
Amazon has more money than most countries. They can outlast any company in court, or just ban you from their services in the future.
Most services have a clause that they are not liable for unforseen issues… Depends how good the lawyers were when formalizing the contracts.
Good luck arguing that a missed config counts as an ‘unforeseen issue’. If they go that route, people will be all over them for not being SOC compliant wrt change control.