Technology & AI mixed · 6–18 months
A what‑if from the future

What if a multi-day AWS and Azure outage froze global commerce?

A multi-day AWS/Azure outage is a revenue/SLA event for SaaS and commerce, but the cleaner trade is muted: it nicks AI-capex sentiment and risk appetite at the margin rather than breaking the semi thesis. Closest analogues are the Dec-2021 AWS us-east-1 outage and the Jul-2024 CrowdStrike event — both caused sharp, very short-lived equity wobbles that fully retraced. Skeptic's note: cloud outages have near-zero persistence in asset prices; this is a headline-fade, not a regime change.

10%
our model probability
over 6–18 months
prediction markets — the market's odds
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Anchored to measured history 10% · 90% range 1–20% · 40 dated precedents behind it — a wider range means thinner evidence

Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.

The butterfly cascade

How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.

Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving

Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…

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What it would mean

If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A multi-day AWS/Azure outage disrupts global commerce and SaaS. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.

Methodology. Probability and impact are anchored to history and scored against what actually happens — wins and losses, in public, at Reality Check. Market odds live from Polymarket & Kalshi. By Vikas Singh, Quantitative Strategist. Updated 2026-08-13.