The recent AWS outage shows that our increasing reliance on cloud technology means downtime is no longer and inconvenience, it’s a crisis for your business. There is a solution, says Meryem Arik
It’s a typical morning at work and you’re racing to meet a deadline – but nothing loads. AWS is down. Or maybe GCP. Or maybe OpenAI. And with it, a huge slice of the modern AI stack – hosted LLMs, APIs, and everyday SaaS tools – goes dark.
Outages happen. They always have, and they’ll happen again. But as businesses pour more of their operations into AI, the price of downtime keeps rising. What used to be a minor disruption now means lost hours, lost revenue, and teams sitting idle. Whether you can keep working comes down to one question: do you own your AI?
Most companies don’t. Their models live entirely inside someone else’s cloud – on hosted APIs and managed infrastructure they neither control nor fully understand. When that layer goes down, so do they. A few high-profile outages this year have made that painfully clear. A single point of failure – a model endpoint, a cloud region, a service dependency – can instantly stop production. Not having access to Slack is an irritation (or possibly a blessing) but not having access to your entire business is a catastrophe.
And this is not just a technical risk, it’s a question that goes to the heart of long-term strategy. When you’re tied to one vendor, you’re basically flying blind with a huge (perhaps invaluable) amount of trust placed in them. Updates land without warning, performance shifts overnight, and terms of service change at the click of a button. Legal disputes or export restrictions upstream can suddenly cascade into your operations. Even a routine deprecation notice can kill off a critical endpoint with no migration path in sight.
That’s why smart companies are starting to build differently. Mindful of the need for genuine autonomy they’re spreading their workloads across clouds, on-prem, and hybrid setups – staying cloud-agnostic by design. This is about control and the freedom to shift workloads when outages hit, to optimise for cost or performance, to meet data locality rules and to stay online no matter who’s having a bad day in Silicon Valley.
The good news is that what once required the resources of a tech giant is now achievable for everyone. The stakes are higher but the tools are better, and customers rightly expect reliability as standard.
AI is evolving at breakneck speed with new models, new methods, new hype every month, but that speed comes with fragility. If you build everything on a single platform you’re betting your business on someone else’s uptime.
Real resilience means ownership and the foundations and the ability to continue running your AI anywhere without depending on a single gatekeeper. That’s the philosophy behind Doubleword: giving enterprises the control to stay online and remain in charge of their own destiny even if all around others are losing their heads, or their AI access.
Because in the AI era, downtime isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a crisis.
Meryem Arik is the Co-founder and CEO of Doubleword