What looked like a “tech issue” early on, quickly became a multi-million-dollar problem.
Last week, AWS went down, and if you were running leadgen campaigns in healthcare, insurance, finance, or e-commerce, chances are you felt it: slow landing pages, dropped leads & broken lead delivery systems.
Let’s break down what actually happened, and what it means for you.
📉 Leads Lost, Revenue Missed
Most infrastructure (including the LeadGen industry) runs on AWS. When these critical services went down, systems across the board failed:
- Landing pages didn’t load
- Forms didn’t save
- Clicks went untracked
- Lead Certification systems couldn’t create certs
Some platforms saw error rates spike to 70%, which means thousands of conversions never made it to anyone’s lead system.
Estimated Loss: $150M–$200M in Ad Revenue in 12 hours.
That’s tens of thousands of leads. Gone. Just like that. And if you’re in a vertical like Insurance, Healthcare, Financial Services, etc., you know each hour of downtime is money lost.
🕑 Medicare Open Enrollment was the Worst Time to Crash
Timing couldn’t have been worse. The outage hit during Medicare Open Enrollment, the most competitive season for healthcare advertisers.
CPCs spike. Demand for leads triples. Clicks from high-intent users flood in for a few short weeks a year.
During the AWS outage, some clients saw traffic fall by 40% and conversions drop 25% in just a few hours. That’s not a dip. That’s a knockout punch in the middle of your Super Bowl.
🥊 Every industry felt the hit
Insurance platforms couldn’t serve quotes. Finance companies couldn’t verify users.Retail lost cart tracking and retargeting. Wherever your funnel relied on AWS, this impacted, and the ripple effects will take days to recover.
💸 Attribution Broke. Budgets Burned.
After the outage, another problem showed up: data gaps. Clicks got logged, but conversions didn’t. Which means campaigns got billed, but attribution failed. So what happens?– Your bidding model panics.– It spends in the wrong places.– It pauses where it shouldn’t.– You waste more money. Industry-wide, that silent loss may total $30M+ in wasted media spend.
🤔 So What Now? Resilience Has to Be Part of Your Strategy.
Here’s the takeaway: this wasn’t a fluke. It’s a reminder. When outages happen, recovery needs to happen as fast as possible, which means doubling down on budgets. Everyone needs to increase their lead amounts today for what they lost yesterday. Don’t miss out!
If you want to know more about how Zeeto can help you make it up for the lost leads, schedule a call with our team. We are ready to help you scale with high-quality leads.
