Why Internet Outages are an Emerging Risk for Utilities
Image courtesy of Alan Levine under CC0 1.0 Universal Deed, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
Internet outages are on the rise, and in fact, some recent high-profile interruptions left millions of people unable to transact online. This is bad enough when you’re trying to use Wi-Fi at home, but utilities – like pretty much all companies in the U.S. – rely on the internet to make their backend systems and processes work. If an internet outage occurs during a power outage, it could cripple the ability to make the necessary repairs.
Why Internet Outages are Getting More Severe
Nov. 2025 saw 3 major internet outages. Most recently, on 11/18/25, an internet services company called Cloudflare crashed, taking massive companies offline including but not limited to X, Discord, Open AI, Shopify, Coinbase, and Dropbox. Just 1 month earlier, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took many websites offline, including Amazon, Snapchat, Ring, Venmo and others.
The problem is that the technology giants that form the backbone of the internet – AKA Cloudflare, Microsoft Azure, and AWS – are increasingly relied upon by businesses in all industries. Simply put, they are growing massively, operating an ever-expanding percentage of the internet, and therefore one obscure software vulnerability or small mistake can create a domino effect that makes it seem like half the internet has been unplugged.
Because of the increasing probability of experiencing an internet outage, this scenario must be accounted for in utility emergency plans. If systems go offline during storm restoration, communications will come to a screeching halt, making it near impossible to function efficiently.
Therefore, it’s imperative to incorporate alternative, unnetworked procedures into your plan. This could be as simple as taking inventory of all systems that would go down during an internet outage, and identifying their core functions, so employees can pinpoint the exact systems and functions that need to be incorporated into contingency planning efforts.
The bottom line is that internet outages are only going to get worse from here, and therefore it is a risk that needs to be accounted for in the emergency plan. Good luck!
