How VBC can support your business during major outages
Today, a global outage at AWS (primarily in the US East-1 region) has caused widespread disruptions to websites, apps and online tools around the world — from games, banking services to government portals.
When your business depends on online systems, any interruption can ripple into the real world: customers unable to reach you, internal staff locked out of tools, or critical processes grinding to a halt.
At VBC, we know that people still need to be able to reach you, even when your digital systems fail. Let’s walk through what’s happening, and how VBC can step in to maintain communication, protect your reputation, and help you stay responsive.
What’s going on – why an outage like this matters
Here are some of the key impacts of an outage of this nature:
- Operational downtime: Infrastructure or applications hosted in the affected region become unreachable, services fail
- Revenue / opportunity loss: If your website or app is down, customers can’t place orders, make enquiries or engage — with direct financial consequences.
- Reputational damage: When customers try to contact you and can’t, or when your front-door systems fail, trust can erode. Effective communication in the outage window becomes a differentiator.
- Dependency risk: Many businesses assume “the cloud” is always on. But when a major provider like AWS suffers a regional failure, so do many downstream services for example Zoom and banking applications
- Complex recovery and uncertainty: Even after a service provider reports “recovery underway”, queues, latency and data-backfill can continue to cause issues.
So, even though the outage may be “up there in the cloud”, the consequences are very much local: for your team, your customers, your phone lines, your reputation.
Practical ways VBC can support you during an outage
Here are the key ways VBC can help your business when things go wrong:
1. Always-on human contact
When digital forms or apps are down, your customers still need a way to reach you. With VBC we can:
- Handle calls on your behalf with a clear message: “We’re aware of some technical issues, but please hold for immediate assistance” (or whatever your preferred script is).
- Capture key information and ensure a follow-up, keeping your customer experience on track even when systems falter.
- Provide live switching to your team via alternative methods (mobile, SMS, etc) if your usual systems fail.
2. Rapid activation of contingency scripts
We can work with you ahead of time to have fallback scripts ready for outage events:
- “Our website/app is currently experiencing issues — for urgent queries please remain on the line, or we’ll call you back within X minutes.”
- Redirecting enquiries to qualified team members or alternative contact channels.
- Logging all calls and enquiries ) so nothing falls through the cracks.
3. Communication buffer & brand protection
Outages can cause confusion and frustration among customers. VBC helps you by:
- Acting as a friendly, professional front-line presence so your customers don’t feel abandoned or ignored.
- Preventing a build-up of unanswered calls, voicemail backlogs, or missed opportunities for service.
- Offering you a breathing space: while you resolve your IT issues, you can rely on us to keep things running.
4. Post-event follow-up and insight
After the disruption we can help by:
- Providing you with call logs and analysis of enquiry patterns during the outage (how many calls, what issues, how customers reacted).
- Helping you identify next steps: Did customers raise the same concern repeatedly? Did calls spike?
- Assisting you in shaping customer communications: e.g., “We apologise for the interruption, here’s what we are doing, we’ll keep you posted.”
5. Pre-planning and resilience consulting
Because we know outages happen (and will happen again), we can work with you proactively:
- Creating a “phone-line safe mode” plan: what happens if your website/app goes offline, how calls will be handled, how customers will be informed.
- Identifying alternative contact workflows: e.g., using call transfers to mobiles, backup email addresses, SMS alerts.
- Ensuring your answering team is briefed and ready for surge patterns (more calls, more urgent enquiries).
- Advising you on customer-communications templates for digital failure events.
Why it matters for you — and your clients
When digital channels falter or vanish altogether, that human connection becomes even more critical and an outage like today’s AWS incident is a stark reminder: digital does not mean “unbreakable”. And in those moments of vulnerability, being reachable, responsive and reassuring is almost as important as the digital service itself.
By positioning VBC as the continuity partner when other channels fail, you help your clients:
- Maintain trust and credibility with their customers.
- Avoid the “dead zone” of unanswered calls and growing backlog.
- Bridge the gap while IT teams fix the root issue.
- Demonstrate a higher level of resilience and care than competitors.
Today’s cloud-outage is not just a technical glitch. It’s a business moment. For those affected, it’s a test of communication, customer service and operational resilience.
At VBC, we understand that when your systems might let you down, your people still expect you to stand up. We’re here to help you stay connected, stay responsive, and stay trusted, no matter what’s happening behind the scenes.
If you’d like to prepare your team for future outages — build a fallback script, test the phone-line process, talk through the hand-offs — just let me know and we can schedule a session.
