The day half the internet stopped, and what it taught
Monday’s cloud outage took down a long list of services, AI assistants among them. The lesson is not about clouds. It is about what you do for the rest of the day.
On 20 October 2025 a fault in a major cloud provider’s systems disrupted a very long list of services for much of the day. Several AI assistants were among them, alongside banking apps, shops and games.
There is a lazy conclusion available here — do not depend on the cloud — and it is wrong. The useful conclusion is narrower and more practical.
Why the lazy conclusion is wrong
Your own server room is not more reliable than a large cloud provider. It fails more often, it simply fails privately and nobody writes an article about it.
The difference is that when a cloud fails, it fails for everyone simultaneously, which is why it is visible. Concentration is a real risk, but the fix is not decentralisation to your own basement.
The question worth asking instead
For each thing your company now does with AI: what do we do on a day when this is not available?
For most tasks, the answer is « we do it the way we did in 2023 », and the cost is a slower afternoon. That is a perfectly good answer and requires no preparation.
It becomes a problem only where the answer is « we cannot » — which happens when an automation has quietly become the only path a process has, and the people who used to do it manually have moved on or forgotten.
The one thing to check this week
Look at your automations, if you have any, and mark the ones where nobody remembers the manual route. That list is short and it is your actual exposure.
Writing the manual steps down for those takes an hour and is the entire business continuity work this subject requires at your size.
And the dependency the outage really exposed
Not on AI. On one provider, underneath many suppliers who never mention it. Several companies that went down on Monday did not know they were sitting on that infrastructure until it stopped.
That is worth a question to your three most important software suppliers, and the answer belongs in the same file as the trust-page links from 4 July.