On October 20, 2025, a DNS problem inside one of Amazon's data centers took a slice of the internet down with it. Booking pages stopped loading. Card terminals threw errors. Email never showed up. More than 3,500 companies felt it, according to the network monitoring firm Ookla, and the trouble reached users in more than 60 countries.
You didn't do anything wrong. You also couldn't fix it.
That is the part of business continuity most owners never plan for. Not the fire. Not the ransomware. The ordinary Tuesday when a company you have never called has a bad morning and takes a piece of your workday with it.
You depend on more companies than you think
Run the list honestly. Your email. Your point-of-sale. The online booking page. Payroll. The time clock. Phones, if they run over the internet. The card reader. Maybe the scheduling app, the accounting software, the shared drive.
Most of that lives in someone else's building now. That is not a mistake. It is cheaper, and it usually works. But it means a chunk of your Monday morning sits inside a system you don't control and can't restart.
The thing about outages like the one in October is that you can't prevent them. You can only decide ahead of time what you will do.
The plan is not "multiple clouds." It is a piece of paper.
Nobody running a twelve-person shop in Marquette or Escanaba needs a second cloud provider. That answers a different question.
The answer to this one is smaller and cheaper: a one-page list of what you do when the screen won't load.
Pick the two or three tools you truly can't run the business without. For each one, write down the manual version of the work. If the card reader is down, you take cash and write receipts by hand. If the booking system is down, you call today's appointments from a printed list and use the paper calendar. If email is down, you phone the customers who matter today.
Then add the details people forget in a hurry. The phone number for support, not just the website. A printed copy of today's schedule. A way to reach your bank. The login for your accounting software, kept somewhere other than the system that is down.
Confidence is not the same as a plan
Here is where most owners are wrong, and it isn't their fault.
A 2026 survey from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that 94% of small business owners believe they would recover from a disaster. Only 31% have a plan. That gap between feeling ready and being ready is where the damage happens.
You see the same pattern in backup data. A 2025 report from Unitrends found that more than 60% of businesses believed they could recover from an outage in under a day. When it actually happened, only 35% could. The rest found out the hard way that believing and knowing are different things.
The test you can run this week
You don't need a consultant to find your weak spots. Ask one question about your most important tool: if this were down for a full day, what would we actually do?
If the answer is a shrug, you just found the plan you need to write. If you want to go further, pick a slow afternoon and pretend. Pull the internet for two hours and see how long the business keeps moving on paper. You will learn more in those two hours than in a year of thinking about it.
The businesses that come through an outage well are not the ones that predicted it. They are the ones that had already decided what they would do.