When your network systems go dark, you probably know what to do: Call your IT lead. Switch over to backup servers. Initiate your recovery plan.
But what if the outage isn’t onsite?
What if Shopify crashes and orders stop syncing? What if Stripe or Clover goes offline and no one can make a payment? What if your WMS or shipping API goes down, halting order production, fulfillment, and delivery notifications?
These aren’t theoretical questions. For mid-sized operations, they’re daily dependencies, and when they fail, your revenue stops cold.
The Blind Spot in Most Continuity Plans
Most companies have a contingency plan for their own infrastructure: redundancies, backup servers, local data recovery.
But almost none account for vendor and SaaS outages — those systems outside your sphere of control that make internal uptime meaningless. Ironically, these outages also have the biggest operational impact.
In manufacturing and logistics, a few hours of downtime from your WMS or shipping vendor can suspend production and strand inventory. In retail or food service, a payment processor outage means no sales, meager customer service, and wasted labor hours.
You may control the lights and servers inside your building. But your business continuity depends just as much on the vendors that live in someone else’s cloud.
The Sting of Vendor Outages
Vendor outages hit harder than local IT disruptions for three key reasons:
They’re unexpected. You don’t get the same warning signals you’d see with internal infrastructure failures. Outages often start with vague status page updates or user complaints that trickle in without clear timelines for resolution.
You can’t fix them yourself. You’re at the mercy of your vendor’s engineers, support queues, and communication flow. Waiting, however, can’t be an option.
There’s no meaningful service level agreement. While vendors may offer service credits or apologies afterward, there is little guarantee during the incident that you can continue operating in real time.
These inevitabilities make vendor outages a direct threat to your continuity, customer trust, and bottom line.
The Reality of Vendor Outages
Vendor outages in real time can cause turmoil for virtually any operation:
- Third-party logistics suddenly can’t print shipping labels after a major carrier’s API goes down. Orders pile up, warehouse staff goes idle, and trucks leave half empty.
- A retail chain can’t process card payments because a cloud POS vendor is struggling with a global authentication issue. Staff move to manual paper slips, but reconciliation later becomes a nightmare.
- A restaurant group unexpectedly loses its online ordering system at lunchtime. Delivery platforms fail to sync, creating customer confusion and wasted prep work.
Each of these outages may last just 30 minutes. But even short disruptions can create hours or days of downstream chaos.
The bigger the operation, the bigger the ripple.
The Case for Availability Resilience
This is where Availability Resilience comes in, a discipline Precise Cyber Solutions helps businesses develop, to maintain operations even when external vendors fail.
Our process starts with an Availability Readiness assessment, designed to find your hidden dependencies and assess financial risk. We map out:
- Critical SaaS vendors and APIs your business relies on for revenue generation.
- Single points of failure that could halt operations.
- Tolerable outage durations (15 minute-, 1 hour-, and 4 hour-scenarios)
- Backup workflows and local fallbacks to sustain priority functions.
From there, we help build Availability Resilience plans, which are step-by-step guides that your teams can follow during an outage, to keep moving forward instead of waiting for the incident to be resolved.
Think of Availability Resilience as your “Plan B” when a vendor’s cloud fails.
Resilience in Real Time
For most organizations, building resilience doesn’t mean having more vendors at the ready if one particular vendor is down. It means strategic preparation:
- Maintaining an alternate payment channel or offline POS mode
- Pre-configuring manual workflows for order entry and labeling
- Setting up communications templates and response playbooks
- Training teams for vendor outage escalation paths
Even partial continuity, for example — keeping 60% of your revenue operations running —can mean the difference between finishing the day strong or losing out entirely.
It’s Time to Plan for the Unmanageable Outages
Cloudflare, Shopify, Stripe, UPS: Every vendor eventually experiences downtime. We just don’t know when.
Without a response plan, those outages become instant revenue stoppers. With a response plan in place, the same outages became merely bumps in the road.
Precise Cyber Solutions helps Nashville manufacturers, logistics providers, retail groups, and restaurant chains implement structured Availability Resilience, so when your vendors fail, your business doesn’t.
Protect your revenue from outages you can’t control.