Our cloud provider was down for 47 minutes. We were down for 4 hours.
That gap? That’s the problem
we’re not talking about.
We have all been in meetings in
which we ask the executive team a simple question: “If our cloud infrastructure
went down right now, how long until we’re back up?”
The answers usually range from
“a few minutes” to “maybe an hour.”
Then someone asks: “When did we
last test that?”
The silence becomes deafening.
Here’s what nobody wants to
admit: We’ve been using “we’re on the
cloud” as a substitute for actual disaster recovery planning. And these
last two months? They just exposed how dangerous that assumption really is.
I’ve been in tech for years.
I’ve survived multiple disasters, failed migrations, and that one intern who
accidentally deleted the production database (we’ve all been there). But
watching these recent outages unfold felt like déjà vu.
We’re not failing because the technology is bad. We’re failing because
we’ve outsourced our thinking.
We’ve Seen
This Movie Before
I was on a team when our
cloud provider had an authentication service issue. I’ll never forget watching
our support Slack channel explode with “Anyone else seeing login issues?” while
our monitoring dashboard showed nothing but green checkmarks.
That outage taught me something
crucial: Perfect monitoring means
nothing if you’re monitoring the wrong things.
We spent hours troubleshooting
our code before we even checked the provider status page. By the time we
understood the issue was upstream, customers had already started leaving angry
reviews.
The worst part? We had no
fallback. No graceful degradation. When their authentication service went
sideways, our entire platform just… broke.
What Separates the Survivors from
the Casualties
These recent outages showed
me the same pattern I’ve seen before:
The companies that survived
weren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest tech stacks.
They were the ones who’d
actually practiced failing.
I have a friend who runs
infrastructure for a fintech startup. During the recent cloud issues, while
other companies were scrambling, his team failed over to their secondary region
in under 10 minutes.
When I asked him how, his
answer was simple: “We break our own stuff every month. This was just another
Tuesday.”
Meanwhile, I’ve been on teams
where we dusted off disaster recovery docs that referenced services we’d
deprecated years ago and contact lists with people who’d left the company.
Sound familiar?
The
Questions That Haunt Me
Every time I see these major
outages, I think back to that meeting and ask myself:
→ When did we last TEST our
backups, not just create them?
→ Can our teams actually
execute incident response without endless approval chains?
→ Do we really know which
dependencies are single points of failure?
→ Are we designing systems that
fail gracefully, or fail catastrophically?
Two months ago, I would’ve
confidently said “we’re fine, we’re in the cloud.”
Today? I’m asking harder
questions.
Here’s What Actually Works
(Learned the Hard Way)
Stop treating multi-cloud like it’s paranoia. I used to think it
was overkill. I was wrong. Your critical paths need a Plan B that doesn’t
depend on one provider having a good day.
Make your runbooks executable, not readable. That Word doc
gathering dust? That’s not disaster recovery. That’s wishful thinking. Automate
your failover. Script your recovery.
Practice your disasters. Chaos engineering seemed excessive until I
lived through an outage with zero preparation. Start small. Break things on
purpose. Learn when the stakes are low.
Monitoring ≠ Observability. I learned this one the hard way. You
need to know WHY things break, not just THAT they broke.
Your SLA is a refund policy, not a safety net. Service credits
don’t rebuild customer trust.
The
Real Cost Nobody Talks About
Revenue loss? Obviously.
Customer churn? Absolutely.
But here’s the hidden cost I’ve
seen destroy teams: Lost credibility
with leadership.
Every time engineers warn “we
need to invest in resilience” and get told “the cloud is reliable,” then this
happens? That trust is brutal to rebuild. I’ve watched talented engineers leave
companies over exactly this.
My challenge to you: Open your disaster recovery plan right now.
Actually open it.
If you can’t find it, or it
hasn’t been updated this year, or half your team doesn’t know it exists—be
honest with yourself about what that means.
I’ve been the person scrambling
during an outage, wishing we’d prepared better. Don’t be me.
The next outage is coming. The
only question is whether it’ll be a brief inconvenience or a resume-generating
event.
What’s your honest assessment: If your primary cloud provider went down
right now for 2 hours, what would actually happen? And more importantly—what
are you doing this week to change that answer?
Drop your thoughts below. Let’s
learn from each other before the next incident, not after. 👇
#CloudOutage #SRE #DevOps #DisasterRecovery #CloudComputing
#TechLeadership #SiteReliability #ITInfrastructure #EnterpriseIT #TechStrategy
#DigitalResilience #CloudArchitecture #dougortiz
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