Cloud-y

Being on the cloud can be incredibly helpful to your business for lots of reasons. And not helpful for a small smattering of reasons but they are much more impactful. Take for example the AWS outage that hit the eastern part of the US (and impacted services across the globe) today, October 10, 2025. AWS supports websites and apps. When AWS goes down, those sites and apps are inoperable.

It is fitting that it is cybersecurity awareness month. While there is no indication that criminal activity was afoot to cause the AWS outage, this is a good time to remind you that man-made disasters are real and can be a result of bad code or the wrong cable being cut: it doesn't have to be intentionally nefarious.

But let's go back to cloud services. There are what are known as the Big Three (AWS, Azure, and Google) since the majority of the market is concentrated in them. There are other cloud companies. They clearly aren't that big or are used as a backup to one of the Big Three. AWS got its start when Amazon increased the amount of servers they had to handle holiday-buying traffic. They then got the idea that they could use those servers as a service to other businesses during the rest of the year.

The world is very reliant on the internet. Lots of what we do as businesses relies on the internet as well. Take away your ability to get work done and you lose money. The AWS outage is expected to result in a loss of billions of dollars across the globe for just a few hours. Even brief interruptions can wreak havoc. Why are these outages happening more frequently? Lack of redundancies and lack of competition. There are many businesses who put all their eggs in one of the Big Three baskets (I've worked on business continuity plans for such businesses to cure this).

I read a statement from United Airlines whose app, online booking services and some internal systems were impacted.

IMPLEMENTED BACK-UP SYSTEMS means they did business continuity. They didn't create work-arounds in the moment; they implemented the systems they created just in case a while ago (possibly after the last major outage that impacted them, possibly even before that). The key is they thought about this and acted, either before it happened at all or as a lesson learned to never be caught flat-footed again. Bravo, United!

Don't let the cloud ruin your sunny day of making money instead of losing it. Have an umbrella with you in the event the clouds bring a massive storm. Do business continuity: the world will not become less reliant on the internet and the Big Three will remain that way for the foreseeable future. And you can be better prepared to meet both facts.