Parametrix to pay claims after MS Azure Outage

Microsoft Corp suffered a networking outage on 25 January, which took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe.

One of the ‘Big Three’, which includes Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure boasts a reported 22% global market share. Thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of users were impacted by the outage event.

Azure’s status page showed a broad impact, with the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa among the regions affected.

Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit.

Outage triggers claims payouts

While the majority of the losses caused by the network interruption are uninsured, specialist Lloyd’s coverholder Parametrix has announced it will issue claim payments to eligible insureds within weeks of their confirmation of loss.

The incident lasted for two hours and 24 minutes, according to the proprietary Parametrix Cloud Monitoring System™. PCMS triggers coverage provided by Parametrix, the New York-headquartered insurance provider. 

“We’re committed to supporting Parametrix policyholders who have been affected by this incident. We will swiftly help them mitigate any financial loss caused by the outage, according to the high standards we have set for service excellence,” said Yonatan Hatzor, co-founder and CEO of Parametrix.

“Companies which are not in possession of dedicated cloud downtime insurance may try to claim coverage under their dependent business interrupon cyber cover, if they have it, but they will have to quantify their losses, which are unlikely to exceed their deductibles or waiting periods. 

“This event demonstrates that the traditional cyber BI policies do not provide sufficient coverage to insureds.”

Concerns about cloud downtime risk exposure are increasing, as businesses world-wide become increasingly dependent on cloud computing.