Cloud Outages are Getting Worse. Here’s What Every Business Must Do

If your business ground to a halt on the morning of October 20, 2025, you weren’t alone. A massive cloud outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) took down a staggering list of services, affecting over 1,000 companies, including major airlines like Delta and United, streaming giants like Disney+ and Hulu, and critical business tools like Slack, Zoom and Reddit.

For many businesses, it was a painful reminder of a lesson we’d perhaps forgotten: the cloud is not infallible. And unfortunately, most experts agree that these cloud outages will only increase in the months ahead with further integration of AI (artificial intelligence).

But that doesn’t mean companies can’t be prepared.

In this post, we unpack why cloud outages are expected to get worse and what your company must do to maintain continuity when it happens.

The Evolution of the Cloud

For years, the promise of the cloud was ultimate reliability and efficiency. Many companies moved their data and applications off-premise with the understanding that hyperscale providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google had built a level of redundancy and cost-efficiency that made on-site infrastructure increasingly unnecessary. And for the most part, they were right.

But as third-party outages became more disruptive, views about the cloud have begun to change yet again.

Tech leaders (including our experts here at Invenio IT) are warning that companies should brace for more cloud outages, not fewer. And the culprit is the very technology that’s poised to revolutionize every industry: AI.

In a recent report by CRN, tech CEO Bob Venero aptly summarized, “[Cloud outages] are just going to continue to increase, especially as we see more AI capabilities being introduced into the enterprise.”

How AI & Automation Create More Risk

The AI boom heightens the risk of outages in a few fundamental ways. New points of failure are created by 1) the increased strain on rapidly evolving cloud systems, and 2) errors–both human and AI—that can occur because of the increased reliance on automation.

The explosive demand for computing power is being layered directly on top of the same infrastructure that hosts your company’s critical data, your M365 email and your production servers. Existing infrastructure, no matter how robust, will feel the pressure. This leads to new complexities, new vulnerabilities, new mistakes and a higher probability of the exact kind of DNS and service failures we just witnessed with AWS.

The takeaway is: Relying 100% on your cloud provider’s uptime, without adequate failsafes, is no longer a recommended strategy. It’s a gamble.

Closing the Gaps: A Multi-Layered Continuity Strategy

Cloud outages cause massive financial losses for businesses because they disrupt access to mission-critical applications and data. So the question becomes: how do companies ensure access to these systems even when outages occur that are beyond their control?

The answer is to create true data independence. This means having separate, secure and isolated copies of your data that you do control – accessible at all times, locally and via a private cloud.

Here are some key ways to achieve this continuity.

1. Protecting Your SaaS Data (M365 & Google Workspace)

For many businesses today, the operational core is Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It’s your email, your files, your Teams chats—it’s everything. In a new era of cloud outages, relying on these providers to maintain uptime (not to mention a 30-day recycle bin for deleted data) is a risk that no business should accept.

This is why using a dedicated SaaS backup tool like Datto SaaS Protection is so important. It creates a complete, independent backup of your data, stored in a separate, secure cloud. So even if Google or Microsoft experiences a major outage, you can continue to access that data.

Just as critically, SaaS backups are also an insurance policy against permanent SaaS data loss, which is extremely common and has many causes. For example, if an employee deletes a critical inbox, or a phishing attack leads to destroyed cloud data, you have a 1-click restore capability to get that data back, exactly as it was. (Get Datto SaaS protection pricing for your organization.)

2. Protecting Your Cloud Infrastructure (Azure & AWS)

For businesses that go beyond SaaS and run their own virtual machines, databases and applications in the public cloud, the risk is even greater. The recent AWS outage hit core services like EC2 (virtual servers) and DynamoDB (databases). This is the engine of a business.

If you’re building on Microsoft’s cloud, you face the same risks. That’s why solutions designed specifically for cloud infrastructure, such as Datto Microsoft Azure Backup, are essential. This service provides robust, independent continuity for your Azure Virtual Machines. It ensures that even if the Azure platform itself experiences a critical failure, you have a clear and rapid recovery path for your core infrastructure, managed independently of the platform that failed. (Learn more about Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure pricing & features.)

3. Protecting Your Hybrid Reality (On-Premise & Cloud)

The CRN article also noted a fascinating trend: “a ‘tremendous’ amount of public cloud repatriation.” As businesses become more savvy about cloud risks and costs, many are pulling some workloads back on-premise or into a private colocation facility.

This creates a “hybrid” environment, which can be more complex to protect. You might have a physical file server in the office, your SaaS data in M365 and a critical application running in Azure. How do you protect all three without juggling three different, disconnected backup systems?

This complexity is why a unified BCDR strategy is so vital. For businesses managing a hybrid environment, an all-in-one platform like Datto SIRIS can be the gold standard. A single solution can protect your on-premise physical and virtual servers while also integrating with your cloud backup. Plus, redundant backups are stored locally and in Datto’s immutable cloud – with a single, unified system – so that you always have access to your data, no matter what the outage or interruption.

Crucially, Datto SIRIS also provides instant virtualization. This means if your primary server fails—whether it’s a local server closet or running in a data center—you can be back up and running from a virtual copy in seconds, with full access to your protected applications and data. (See Datto SIRIS pricing.)

4. Achieving Total Data Sovereignty: The Private Cloud Model

Some organizations cannot accept any risk of a public cloud outage (or any risks at all associated with storing data on servers that are shared with other entities). Businesses in finance, healthcare or government often face strict data sovereignty and compliance regulations (like HIPAA, CMMC or ITAR) that dictate their data cannot reside in a multi-tenant, public cloud – including even their backups.

But with cloud outages expected to worsen, private clouds are becoming increasingly attractive to other companies too, and solutions like Datto SIRIS Private make this easily achievable for small- to mid-sized businesses.

Instead of replicating your on-premise SIRIS backups to the public Datto Cloud, you replicate them to a second SIRIS device that you own and control. This “target” device can be at your own DR facility, a secure colocation or a secondary office. Your data never traverses the public internet or co-mingles with other businesses’ data.

Conclusion

The cloud is, and will remain, a powerful tool for business – and it will become even more powerful with deeper integration of AI. But this evolution will also create new risks for bigger cloud outages, data loss and operational disruptions.

Organizations must take steps to ensure that they can maintain access to their mission-critical data and applications when these outages inevitably occur. Backing up cloud data (including M365 and Google Workspace), as well as having local, instantly bootable virtual backups, is now essential for implementing a multilayered continuity strategy.

Get a customized continuity strategy

Schedule a call with one of our data protection specialists at Invenio IT to learn more about protecting your business from cloud outages with dependable data backup and disaster recovery solutions. Call us at (646) 395-1170 or email success@invenioIT.com.