What Happened

Today, June 12, 2025, a rare and disruptive event hit the internet: multiple major cloud platforms—including Google Cloud, Cloudflare, and possibly AWS—experienced simultaneous outages. The ripple effects were felt across websites, apps, and services around the world. For small business owners, this serves as a stark reminder of how dependent we are on a handful of providers to keep our digital operations running.

Google Cloud appeared to be the hardest hit, with over 11,000 incident reports logged on Downdetector. Users reported problems accessing services like Google Search, Drive, Meet, and Gmail. Cloudflare, which provides DNS, CDN, and API services for a large chunk of the internet, also confirmed partial outages via their status page. While AWS hasn't officially reported a major outage as of now, even minor disruptions on their platform can have wide-reaching effects. Together, these incidents disrupted everything from internal communications to customer-facing websites.

Why It Matters for Small Businesses

For small businesses, this kind of outage can cause real and immediate consequences. Websites that rely on Cloudflare’s content delivery network or Google-hosted services may have gone offline or slowed to a crawl. Businesses using e-commerce platforms that depend on these cloud services might have faced issues with payments, inventory management, or CRM tools. And companies using Google Workspace could have temporarily lost access to email, documents, calendars, or video meetings during crucial business hours.

If you're a small business owner, today’s outage is a wake-up call. First and foremost, it's important to have a contingency plan. This could be as simple as maintaining static versions of your most important website pages that can be served during a failure, or as complex as setting up multi-region or multi-cloud failover systems. While not every small business has the budget for advanced cloud redundancy, even basic steps—like enabling page caching, using social media for real-time customer communication, or monitoring the status pages of services you rely on—can go a long way.

What You Can Do to Prepare

Now is also a good time to identify your digital dependencies. Which tools, services, and platforms does your business rely on? Are they all hosted with one provider? If so, consider diversifying where possible. For example, critical APIs or databases could have backup instances on a different cloud. If your website is essential to your business, talk to your developer or hosting provider about adding basic failover protections and caching strategies to keep it live longer during outages.

Finally, as the dust settles, take a moment to reflect. Conduct a quick post-mortem: What went down? How did it affect your customers or sales? What could you do differently next time? Building digital resilience isn’t just for big companies. With the right mindset and a few smart choices, small businesses can prepare for moments like these—and even come out stronger.