When the Cloud Goes Down, Who Keeps Your Business Running?

On October 20, 2026, several major banks in the United Kingdom experienced disruptions to their online services.

Customers had trouble accessing banking applications and completing everyday transactions. Behind the scenes, the problem wasn't necessarily with the banks' own systems.

A power failure had affected part of Google Cloud's infrastructure in London.

The disruption lasted approximately six hours, affecting multiple cloud services and organizations that depended on them.

Google's engineers worked to restore service. But for the businesses relying on that infrastructure, there was only so much they could do while waiting.

And that's where this story becomes relevant to almost any business today.

What happens when the technology your business depends on stops working, but the problem is completely outside your control?

The Cloud Has Changed How Businesses Operate

For many small and midsize businesses, moving to the cloud has been a positive change.

Employees can access applications from different locations. Companies no longer need to maintain as much infrastructure themselves. Updates, maintenance, and many technical responsibilities are handled by specialized providers.

It's easy to understand why businesses have embraced this approach.

But there's a dependency that can be overlooked.

When a business moves its email, accounting, customer management, or other essential systems to the cloud, those systems still depend on physical infrastructure somewhere.

And that infrastructure can fail.

The October 20 incident is a reminder that even major technology providers, with sophisticated infrastructure and extensive resources, cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability.

When One Problem Affects Several Services

Consider how many everyday business activities now depend on cloud applications.

A sales team needs its customer management system to follow up on opportunities. Accounting needs access to financial records. Employees depend on shared documents, communication platforms, and online applications.

These services may appear separate to the people using them.

But behind the scenes, some may depend on the same infrastructure or interconnected providers.

When that shared dependency experiences problems, several business functions can be affected at once.

The immediate concern isn't necessarily lost information.

It's the inability to work.

Employees may spend time repeatedly attempting to access applications. Managers may not know whether the issue is internal or widespread. Customers may be waiting for answers that the business cannot immediately provide.

And while everyone is trying to understand what happened, normal operations slow down.

Your IT Provider May Not Be Able to Fix the Outage

This is one of the more uncomfortable realities of cloud computing.

A business can have properly maintained computers, a reliable network, and responsive IT support, yet still experience downtime because an external service is unavailable.

Your IT provider cannot repair a power failure inside a major cloud provider's data center.

But that doesn't mean there is nothing useful IT support can do.

A prepared IT team can help determine whether the issue is local or external, identify which services are affected, communicate what is known, and help employees use available alternatives.

More importantly, much of that preparation should happen before an outage.

Because when a critical application suddenly becomes unavailable, that's a difficult time to begin figuring out which business processes depend on it.

The Question Isn't Whether the Cloud Is Reliable

Cloud platforms remain valuable for businesses of almost every size.

The lesson from this incident isn't that companies should abandon cloud services or return everything to local servers.

It's that reliability and business continuity are not exactly the same thing.

A cloud provider may have excellent availability over the course of a year. But if an interruption happens during an important business activity, even a few hours can create serious operational challenges.

The more useful question is whether the business has considered what happens during those hours.

For example:

• Which applications would immediately prevent employees from doing their jobs?
• Are there essential tasks that could continue temporarily without those applications?
• Who determines whether an outage is internal or related to a service provider?
• How will employees and customers receive updates?
• What needs to happen before normal operations can safely resume?
  

Not every business needs expensive redundant infrastructure or complicated disaster recovery systems.

Sometimes the most practical improvements involve documented procedures, clear responsibilities, and a realistic understanding of which activities can and cannot continue.

Backups Are Important, but They Don't Solve Every Interruption

Businesses often associate continuity planning with backups.

And backups are essential when information is deleted, damaged, or otherwise needs to be recovered.

But a backup doesn't necessarily help employees access a cloud application when the provider itself is unavailable.

That distinction matters.

Having a copy of your information is different from having a practical way to continue operating while the system that normally processes that information is offline.

This is why business continuity planning needs to consider more than data protection.

It should also address people, processes, dependencies, communication, and recovery priorities.

We explore that distinction further in our article, Why Business Continuity Is More Than Having Backups.

What Would Your Business Do for Six Hours?

The Google Cloud incident eventually ended, and affected services recovered.

But the bigger question remains.

If a critical cloud application became unavailable tomorrow morning, would your employees know whether to wait, switch to an alternative process, or contact someone for guidance?

Would your business know which operations could continue and which would have to stop?

These aren't questions that require a major technology investment to begin answering.

They require understanding how your business actually works and where its technology dependencies exist.

Because the goal isn't to promise that interruptions will never happen.

It's to make sure an interruption doesn't leave everyone wondering what to do next.