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.

Most services have a clause that they are not liable for unforseen issues.. Depends how good the lawyers were when formalizing the contracts.

99% uptime in a year gives you 3.65 days of downtime, which I think would still be within SLA (assuming nothing else happened this year). Though, once you get to 1 9 reliability (99.9%), you've got a shift and change you can be down before you breach SLA.

If their reliability metrics are monthly, 99% gets you less than a shift of down time, so they'd be out of SLA and could probably yell to get money back.

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).

Oh yea, other companies will sue them, and when amazon completely fails they will be bailed out with consumers' tax money. Or did we already forget that's what happens?

Amazon has more money than most countries. They can outlast any company in court, or just ban you from their services in the future.

Just because this may NOT have been caused by AI doesn't mean that AI in 99% of places isn't absolute horse shit