When the cloud goes dark: what every IT leader should have ready before the next outage

A large cloud outage on October 20, 2025, highlighted the critical need for robust business continuity plans in a cloud-first world, as it disrupted numerous internet services and underscored that even top-tier platforms can experience failures. To mitigate such incidents, it's essential for companies to understand their dependencies across identity, DNS, networking, and APIs, and to implement strategies that focus on reducing the impact of outages, such as by designing systems that assume components will fail. Outages can lead to significant revenue loss, reputation damage, increased workload for teams, and potential security risks, making it vital for organizations to have tested continuity plans covering various failure scenarios and to adopt multi-cloud strategies for increased resilience and portability. Platforms like Upsun can facilitate this by providing tools for predictable restoration, but ultimately, the focus should be on designing for failure, practicing restoration, and ensuring consistent communication to protect revenue and reputation when cloud services falter.