When the Internet Blinks: What the Cloudflare Outage Means for Greater East Montgomery Businesses

At some point this year, your technology is going to fail you; probably more than once. A recent survey found that small businesses lose over 98 hours a year, roughly 12 working days, to slow internet, clunky devices, and other technology issues that derail normal work. That is more than two full work-weeks gone, just fighting tools that are supposed to help you.

Last week we looked at payment interruptions and scams. This week, I want to focus on one piece of that bigger technology story: the internet connection and cloud tools underneath almost everything you do.

Last week, a major internet infrastructure provider had an outage that briefly knocked or slowed hundreds of well-known websites and services offline. None of that started in our local area of Greater East Montgomery County, but when the systems behind payment processing, online booking, or your basic website misbehave, the impact lands right here at the counter, in the exam room, or at the front desk. For small and midsize businesses, studies now estimate that each hour of serious downtime can mean between about $7,600 and $25,600 in direct losses, before you even count lost opportunities or impacts on your reputation.

In our area, most owners depend on a quiet chain of internet and cloud tools working together in the background, routers and wireless in the building, the local internet provider, and then the cloud platforms and “invisible middlemen” that keep websites fast and secure. When any piece of that chain breaks, it does not show up as a technical report. It shows up as people standing in line while terminals spin, customers who cannot book or confirm online, and staff trying to keep things moving without the systems they rely on.

This edition of the Greater East Montgomery Resilience Brief again shares two local risks to watch and one ten-minute action you can actually take this week. This time, we are looking at the Communication and Technology domain within the Small Business Resilience Score^TM (SBRS): how well you can keep serving customers when the internet or cloud tools go sideways.

This brief looks at:

• Hidden internet and cloud dependencies that suddenly break your day.
  Most owners can name their internet provider and payment terminal brand. Very few could draw the full path from “tap card here” or “book online” back through all the services that make it work. When an internet or cloud provider in the middle of that path has a problem, it can instantly break tools you depend on, even if your lights are on and your own equipment has not changed. For a local business, that looks like card terminals that time out, online ordering pages that freeze, or email and shared documents that will not load, right when you need them. The real risk is that you find out about these hidden dependencies for the first time in the middle of a rush, with customers watching.

• Internet outages that quietly become lost sales and extra work.
  When your internet and cloud tools fail at a busy time, the damage is not just “a technology glitch.” A restaurant or retailer can lose an entire lunch or evening because customers cannot pay the way they planned, or do not want to wait through a slow manual process. A clinic, dental office, or professional firm may suddenly lose access to its schedule, records, or portals, leading to cancellations, delays, and confusion. After the outage, someone still has to reenter handwritten notes, fix double bookings, call people back, and reconcile what was sold against what the system thinks happened. All of that is real money and real time that started as “the internet blinked for a while.”

One 10-minute step: Walk through a one-hour “no internet” scenario for your business

You do not need a crisis communications plan, a technology department, or any new hardware to get started. In the next week, take ten minutes to sit down with a pad of paper at your counter or desk and walk through this simple exercise:

Ask: “If our internet went down for one hour in the middle of our busiest time, what actually stops?”

• First, list the specific things you absolutely must be able to do in that hour to feel like you are truly open for business.
  Examples might include running cards, checking today’s appointments, printing tickets or work orders, looking up key information, or sending quick updates to customers or vendors. Write them the way you would say them to your team.

• Next, go down the list and put a star next to anything that depends completely on your internet connection, online tools, or devices.
  If, without the internet, your honest answer would be “we cannot do this at all” or “we would be making it up as we go,” mark it. Those starred items are the soft spots in how your business communicates and uses technology; the same area I look at in my Small Business Resilience Score.

• Finally, pick just one starred item and write down a simple backup method you would actually use.
  That might look like keeping a printed copy of today’s schedule at the front each morning, using a basic paper sales log to record transactions during an outage and running them once systems return, or having a short message ready for your door and social media that explains you are still open but using an alternate payment process for a short time. The goal is not a perfect plan. The goal is one clear fallback you are comfortable with.

At the end of ten minutes, you will have a short list that shows exactly where an internet outage would hit you hardest and at least one concrete backup step. That list is the start of a stronger Communication and Technology domain in your Small Business Resilience Score, and it is the kind of raw material that can be turned into a simple, tested “Outage-Ready” playbook over time.

I have keep these briefs in plain English and specifically written for busy owners and managers, because you probably do not have full-time risk people (like me). The goal is to make it a little harder for one internet hiccup to turn into a lost rush, a long night of rework, or a bad customer memory, and to move you one small step closer to being outage and disruption ready.

If you would like a quick snapshot of your own situation, I have set up a 2-minute mini-assessment (below) you can take online. You will see where your biggest gap is, and I will send you one practical fix you can use this week.

• Resilience Intelligence page

• Take the 2-minute mini-assessment

• Contact us

If one frozen checkout line, broken booking page, or sudden “system down” message could really hurt your business, and you would like to know more specific ways to protect your business, please reach out to me. You can use the Contact Us link above if you like.

Thank you,
Warren