AWS outage sparks payment dispute time bomb, warns Chargebacks911 CEO Monica Eaton

To be attributed to Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911:

“When AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu. Outages like this cause frustrated users, but also triggers a domino effect across payment flows. Failed authorisations, duplicate charges, broken confirmation pages, all of that fuels a wave of disputes that merchants will be cleaning up for weeks. And once a customer files a dispute, you are already on the back foot.”

“What I expect now is a spike in ‘I never got my service’ or ‘I was charged twice’ claims. Many of those won’t be fraud, just confusion. But confusion is the number one driver of chargebacks. If merchants sit back and wait for disputes to roll in, they will bleed revenue unnecessarily.”

“The smart move is to get ahead of the narrative. Run duplicate charge sweeps. Push proactive notifications to affected users. Document the outage window for clean evidence. Offer fast refunds where appropriate. It is cheaper to fix misunderstandings than fight losing battles in the dispute process.”

“The outage will end long before the disputes do. Any business that treats this as a one-day incident is already behind. Downtime happens, but silence and slow responses are what cause real damage.”

About Monica Eaton

Monica Eaton is the Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, as well as Chief Information Officer of Global Risk Technologies. Monica has worked tirelessly to educate merchants and financial institutions about hidden threats in the rapidly changing payment fraud landscape. Leading Chargebacks911, was founded in Tampa Bay, Florida, expanding internationally also to become Europe’s first chargeback remediation specialist to tackle the chargeback fraud problem. In ten years, Chargebacks911 has successfully protected more than 10 billion online transactions and has recovered over $1 billion in chargeback fraud.

Recognizing that the impact of chargebacks goes beyond merchants, Fi911 provides unrivaled support to financial institutions with innovative back-office management technologies. Fi911’s pioneering DisputeLab™ tool streamlines chargeback management for acquirers, automating legacy processes and standardizing methods that simplify and speed the end-to-end workflow, improving the customer experience and accountability for all stakeholders.

Monica is a passionate diversity advocate committed to developing and sharing innovative solutions that empower the global fintech space. She has earned numerous awards, distinctions and special recognitions, including the Retail Systems Awards’ Outstanding Individual Achievement Award, Fintech Futures PayTech Awards’ 2025 Woman in Payment Award, the Women in Governance, Risk and Compliance Awards’ 2025 CEO of the Year, and was named to American Banker’s 2024 Most Influential Women in Fintech.