WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE CLOUD GOES DOWN?

Megan Poljacik & Bryan Doherty • November 24, 2025

The internet has had a series of bad days over the last few months. In October, Microsoft 365 briefly went sideways in North America after a network misconfiguration disrupted access to Teams and Exchange Online before service recovered the same day. A few weeks later, Microsoft Azure suffered an outage after a faulty configuration change was pushed to Azure Front Door Configuration, affecting Microsoft 365, Xbox, and other services worldwide. Around the same time Amazon crashed, stating that an AWS disruption stemmed from a DNS automation bug associated with DynamoDB. This is an automated system that directs internet traffic that made a timing mistake, and that small glitch quickly snowballed and knocked parts of the service offline. Most recently, Cloudflare, a service many websites use to load faster and block bad traffic, went down, leaving millions unable to access sites and services.


It’s no surprise that many business owners are now asking whether the cloud is still a safe choice for their business. Short answer: yes. For most small and mid-size companies, the cloud is still the safest, most cost-effective place to run everyday tools. It delivers enterprise-grade security, constant patching, and built-in resilience that would be expensive to match on your own. But “safe” doesn’t mean “never fail.”


These outages are a wake-up call that cloud service companies rely so heavily on the supply chain. We as consumers must put pressure on corporations to have more redundancies. That’s why incidents at providers like Cloudflare, the “air-traffic control” that many services rely on, can ripple far across the internet.


For many outages, you are at the mercy of the vendor, but there are things you can do to work around it. Start by deciding where downtime would hurt most, then add targeted redundancy like a second internet provider for key locations. Protect communications with email continuity (a backup way to send/receive during an outage) and keep independent email backups so you can recover messages if needed. For larger companies or truly critical systems, consider selective multi-cloud strategies so a second provider can carry the load if the primary stumbles.


With a few smart safeguards, a cloud outage becomes a speed bump, not a roadblock. While some outages are unmitigable, and we may have to wait while the internet engineers fix things. When that happens, perhaps we use the time to slow down, take a breather, step outside and take an internet snow day.

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By Megan Poljacik • July 31, 2025
In the early 2000s, tensions in the middle east were on the rise. Iran’s government had begun expanding its uranium enrichment capabilities, insisting it was for nuclear energy purposes. However many countries around the globe feared it was a coverup for a nuclear weapons program. Despite pressure from United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran continued to enrich uranium. Frustrations reached a fever pitch and it appeared a conflict was imminent, until a mysterious solution came from a completely unexpected source: the Stuxnet Computer Worm.

DARK WEB MONITORING: ESSENTIAL SAFEGUARD OR WASTED SPEND?

By Megan Poljacik • June 26, 2025
With growing concerns about data breaches and stolen credentials, many businesses feel pressured to invest in services that claim to scan the dark web for leaked information. But before committing resources, it's worth asking whether these tools actually provide meaningful information or if they are an unproductive expenditure. The dark web is a hidden part of the internet that you can’t reach with standard browsers or search engines. It operates using a system called Tor, which stands for The Onion Router. Tor keeps users anonymous by sending their internet traffic through several different servers around the world, encrypting the data each time. This makes it extremely difficult to trace who someone is or where they’re connecting from. Unlike regular websites that end in .com or .org, dark web sites usually end in .onion and require the Tor browser to access them. While some people use the dark web for legitimate reasons like protecting their privacy or avoiding censorship, it’s mostly associated with hosting illegal activities like online black markets, where stolen corporate data is sold.