A Dubai entrepreneur faced challenges accessing nearly half of the tools essential for her business due to the global outage from the Amazon Web Services disruption. Jen Blandos, founder and CEO of Female Fusion, detailed the impact on her operations.
“Being a tech-based business, about 50% of our tools were inaccessible,” she noted. “Our business platform, Kajabi, was down. They updated us frequently, which was helpful, but we were left waiting. Many experienced issues with Zoom, Canva, and AI platforms like Perplexity.”
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On Monday, several popular sites like Roblox, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Amazon.com experienced disruptions. Nearly three hours post-outage, AWS announced a recovery of global services. The DNS issue was “fully mitigated,” allowing most AWS services to function normally.
Jen shared that having both online and offline data backups helped manage the outage. “A colleague called, unable to access our client directory,” she explained. “We keep a backup of all data, including a contact list updated weekly. Having the latest version allowed us to continue our work seamlessly.”
Wakeup Call
Jen believes this incident is a wakeup call for businesses, especially those experiencing financial losses. “Entrepreneurs facing sales losses or disruptions should reconsider their business continuity strategies,” she advised. “With frequent internet outages, businesses must be prepared.”
Tech experts agree. “The AWS outage highlights the need for resilience beyond a single provider,” said Jadd Elliot Dib, CEO of Dubai-based PangaeaX. “Organizations must implement multi-region or hybrid architectures for redundancy and continuity.”
Dubai-based IT Max Global confirmed the outage’s impact on critical business applications and consumer apps in a statement to Khaleej Times. “Autodesk faced significant issues with licensing servers, affecting engineers and architects,” the statement noted. “Popular collaboration tools like Monday.com, Jira, Frame.io, Typeform, and Canva also went offline, affecting project management and creative tasks.”
Media professional Mita Srinivasan couldn’t join a Zoom call with her team due to the outage. “After several attempts, we switched to Google Meet,” she shared. “Small businesses like mine depend heavily on online tools. Internet outages can be highly disruptive and costly.”
