Stop Leaving AWS Credits Unclaimed - That Outage Might've Owed You Money

Remember the AWS outage on October 20th? Six hours down. Over 100+ services affected. Millions of users impacted.

Everyone's talked about the RCA, multi-region setups, and resilience planning. But here's what most teams completely miss: 👉 You might be owed money.

The SLA Reality Check

AWS makes uptime promises like: - Cognito — 99.9% - DynamoDB — 99.99% (and 99.999% for Global Tables) - EC2, Lambda, CloudFront… all have their own SLAs.

Now, do the math: 6 hours of downtime in a 30-day month = 99.17% uptime. That's below every single SLA above.

What That Means for You

If your services were affected, you're entitled to service credits — typically 10–25% of your monthly bill. So if you spend $10K/month on Cognito or DynamoDB… that's real money sitting unclaimed.

How to Claim It (Takes 10 Minutes) 1. Go to your AWS Support Center 2. Open a new case 3. List the affected services 4. Reference the SLA breach 5. Submit before the end of the second billing cycle

AWS won't credit you automatically. You have to ask.

The Takeaway

Yes — improve your DR and multi-region strategy. But also — don't forget to claim what you're owed. It's quick, it's legit, and your FinOps team will thank you.