On Monday 20th of October 2025, a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) sent ripples across the internet, impacting thousands of companies and affecting millions of users. For businesses that rely on cloud-based SaaS applications to run their daily operations, the disruption was a stark reminder of a critical vulnerability: when a foundational service goes down, access to your own essential data can vanish in an instant.
While countless businesses scrambled to find workarounds, our customers at ProBackup experienced a different reality. Because our platform provides independent, daily backups of their critical SaaS data, the widespread outage didn't lock them out. They could still sign in to ProBackup, view their complete data backups, and access the business-critical information they needed to keep moving forward.
Core checklist / principles to protect productivity from major outage
When you use cloud productivity apps to manage your work, it is strongly recommended to protect yourself against any service interruptions or downtime. Guaranteeing a 100% uptime to your cloud data will be difficult, but there are a few things you can do to minimize the risks of not having access to your data. Here’s a checklist to minimize downtime:
- Implement automated, daily backups: Don't rely on manual processes that can be forgotten or overlooked. The best strategy is to use a service that automatically backs up all your data once every 24 hours, ensuring you always have a recent copy without any manual effort .
- Keep your backups independent: Store your backups on a platform that is separate from your primary SaaS application. This ensures that if your main service provider experiences an outage, your critical backup data remains safe and accessible.
- Maintain a fallback data source: For ultimate peace of mind, have a secondary, easily accessible version of your data. Services that offer an optional sync to familiar formats like Google Sheets provide a crucial fallback, allowing you to access your information even if the primary application is down.
- Ensure easy and granular restore options: A backup is only useful if you can restore it quickly. Look for a solution that offers granular, one-click restore capabilities. This allows you to recover single records, comments, or even entire projects with just a few clicks, minimizing disruption .
- Regularly verify your backup status: Don't just "set it and forget it." Use automated status reports, such as weekly summary emails, to confirm that your backups are running successfully and that your data is protected.
Example: our customer’s business continuity during the recent AWS outage
400 Businesses Continued
The numbers from Monday tell a compelling story of resilience. During the outage, **more than 10% of the 4,000+ organizations we support logged into ProBackup.** This wasn't just passive viewing; it was active engagement. We saw around **2,000 data tables requested** and **85 of them exported to Excel** as teams retrieved vital information to continue their work. In a moment of widespread digital paralysis, our customers found a lifeline to their data.
A Multi-Layered Safety Net
Beyond direct access through our app, many customers benefited from an additional layer of preparedness. Our optional sync to Google Drive feature proved invaluable, allowing users to access their backups directly in Google Sheets and folders [1]. This provides a powerful fallback, empowering teams with access to their data in a familiar format they can rely on, even if our own service were ever unavailable [1]. For those using "Desktop for Drive," this data was even accessible offline, creating a truly robust and independent data reserve.
Beyond Outages: The Real Reason for Backups
While a large-scale outage is a dramatic example, it’s just one of many reasons why a dedicated backup strategy is non-negotiable for modern businesses. The most common threats to your SaaS data are often less sensational but just as damaging:
- An accidental field change or a flawed data import can corrupt records and set a project back by days
- Malicious Intent: A disgruntled employee can intentionally delete crucial data, causing significant harm to the company.
* Glitches and Bugs: Technical errors within an application or a third-party integration can lead to unexpected data loss.
Monday’s events were a widespread stress test, but these smaller, more frequent risks are what make a reliable backup and restore solution an everyday necessity.
Saving the day
The most rewarding part of the day was hearing directly from our customers. We received a handful of messages from organizations telling us that ProBackup had "saved the day," enabling them to continue serving their own clients and keep their operations running smoothly.
We are incredibly proud to have our customers' backs during one of the most significant service disruptions in recent memory. Incidents like these reinforce our mission: to provide peace of mind and unwavering data resilience, ensuring that your business is prepared for the unexpected.
