One Dubai entrepreneur had trouble accessing almost 50 percent of tools she usually uses to run her business as a result of the global outage caused by the Amazon Web Services disruption. Jen Blandos, founder and CEO of networking group Female Fusion explained how the incident impacted her working.

“We are a tech business so about 50 percent of the tools we used were not available,” she said. “The platform on which we do business, called Kajabi, was down. They were giving us updates every couple of minutes, which was great, but we could do nothing but wait. I know some people had issues with Zoom, Canva and several AI-platforms like Perplexity.”

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On Monday, services were disrupted for several popular websites, including Roblox, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Amazon.com. Almost three hours after the outage, AWS confirmed global services and features have recovered. The underlying DNS issue was"fully mitigated, and most AWS service operations are succeeding normally."

Jen said that having backups of all their data both offline and online helped her tide over the hours-long outage. “My colleague called me saying she was unable to get into our directory for the contact details of a client,” she said. “We have the backup of all our data including our updated contact list that is downloaded once a week. Our most recent download was on Sunday. So, I was able to retrieve the information and pass it on to my colleague so that we could continue working without being disrupted.”

Wakeup call

According to Jen, the incident should act as a wakeup call for businesses, especially if it cost them money. “If there are entrepreneurs who lost out on sales or had to face huge disruptions because of the outage, this should be a wake-up call for them as to whether this is how they want to continue doing business,” she said. “Over the last few years, there have been several internet outages and other issues. Businesses must be prepared to work around them.”

Her views were echoed by tech experts as well. “The AWS outage shows why resilience can’t rely on a single provider,” said Jadd Elliot Dib, CEO of PangaeaX, a Dubai-based data analytics platform. “Whether through multi-region or hybrid architectures, businesses need built-in redundancy to ensure continuity when, not if, disruptions occur.”

Meanwhile, Dubai-based IT services and digital transformation provider IT Max Global said in a statement to Khaleej Times that the outage impacted business-critical applications, creative platforms, and popular consumer apps.

“Autodesk was among the hardest hit, with licensing servers unable to sync, leaving engineers and architects without access,” the statement read. “Collaboration and productivity tools widely used by customers also went offline. Customers reported downtime on Monday.com, Jira, Frame.io, Typeform and Canva, disrupting project management, design work, and creative workflows.”

For media professional Mita Srinivasan, the outage left her unable to join a pre-planned Zoom call with her team to share weekly updates. “We tried for several minutes and then opted for a Google Meet call,” she said. “A lot of small businesses like mine rely almost entirely on online tools. For us, an internet outage can get very disruptive and very costly.”