This year, several major outages disrupted operations across industries, each one revealing gaps in business continuity planning. Reviewing these events is a chance to identify weak spots in your own strategy and make improvements before an outage affects your business. For small businesses especially, a few targeted fixes now can help avoid major headaches down the line.
January: Conduent outage
The year kicked off with a major disruption involving Conduent, a back-office support service provider for government agencies, transportation systems, and other organizations. The outage affected payment processing, digital forms, and customer support lines across multiple US states.
Conduent later confirmed the cause: a cybersecurity breach traced to a third-party compromise that resulted in unauthorized access and required full system recovery.
What’s the business continuity planning takeaway?
Vendor-related outages can impact your operations just as much as internal failures, sometimes more. Even if your systems are secure, a partner’s breach can bring everything to a halt. Build your continuity plan with this in mind. List all third-party services critical to your daily operations, then prepare backup options or manual processes you can use if those services go down.
May: SentinelOne outage
In late May, cybersecurity provider SentinelOne experienced a seven-hour outage that blocked customers from accessing their dashboards. As a result, users couldn’t view security-related alerts or data. SentinelOne later confirmed that endpoint protection remained active on individual devices, but a software flaw had taken the central console offline.
What’s the business continuity planning takeaway?
Losing visibility, even when protection is still running, creates a serious blind spot. When your entire security operation relies on one provider, a single issue on their end can limit how quickly you detect or respond to threats. A stronger continuity plan spreads out that risk. Consider using a mix of security tools, setting up basic backup monitoring, or adding a secondary layer of protection to maintain visibility when one system goes offline.
April: Zoom outage
On April 16, 2025, Zoom had a nearly two-hour global outage, disconnecting thousands of users from meetings across the USA, India, the UK, and other major regions. The disruption stemmed from a suspected DNS configuration issue that prevented browsers from locating Zoom’s servers. During the outage, users were unable to log in, join calls, or access links, bringing classrooms, business meetings, and virtual hearings to a standstill.
What’s the business continuity planning takeaway?
The incident shows how heavily modern businesses depend on a single communication tool. When Zoom went down, many organizations suddenly had no way to meet or collaborate. Therefore, your continuity plans should include backup video platforms such as Google Meet or Teams, training employees to switch quickly if their primary system fails.
October: AWS outage
In October, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted over a thousand websites, apps, and services, affecting both businesses and consumers. The 15-hour disruption outage was caused by a bug in AWS's automation software, which prevented one of its core services from managing traffic correctly.
What’s the business continuity planning takeaway?
The AWS outage highlights how one provider’s failure can create a ripple effect, impacting direct users and other services built on top of that provider’s platform. A strong continuity plan should account for cascading failures. This means considering alternative platforms or backup systems to keep your operations running, even when a major provider gets disrupted.
For example, one of the affected applications was Asana, a task management platform. When AWS went down, Asana users couldn’t access task-related information or updates, disrupting business processes across organizations around the globe. In such cases, businesses can use backup tools such as Trello or Google Sheets to track tasks, share updates, and keep projects moving forward until normal service resumes.
Prepare your business for a steadier 2026
Each incident was unique, yet they all pointed to the same truth: business interruptions are unavoidable. The best way to keep operations running smoothly during provider outages is through proactive preparation.
If you're looking to strengthen your business continuity planning for the year ahead, contact Kortek Solutions. We offer specialized business continuity solutions tailored to small businesses.