Cloud Downtime Happens. Here's How to Plan for It
It was a Monday, naturally. At 9.12am the shop's point of sale stopped loading. At 9.13am Omondi switched the router off and on. At 9.15am he did it again, harder. At 9.20am there were eleven customers in the queue, two of them sighing loudly in the way only Nairobi shoppers can. Nobody knew whether the problem was the internet, the power, the cloud service or the router's feelings. This is why business continuity planning in Kenya is not just for banks and airlines. It is for anyone whose work depends on a screen.
Downtime is normal, panic is optional
Even the biggest cloud providers have outages. They are usually short and rare, but they happen. Add local realities, power cuts, fibre cut by roadworks, a mobile network having a bad day, and it is clear that every business will sometimes find its systems unavailable. The goal is not to prevent every outage. It is to keep working calmly when one happens.
Business continuity planning: find out what is actually down
The first ten minutes are often wasted guessing. Create a simple checklist staff can follow:
Is the power on, and is the router lit up?
Can you open any other website, such as a news site?
Does the system work on a phone using mobile data?
Does the provider\'s status page report a problem?
Is anyone else in the office or another branch affected?
Those five questions usually tell you whether it is your power, your internet, your device or the service itself, and therefore who to call.
Have a backup connection
Many outages are really internet outages. A second connection from a different provider, even just a mobile router with a data bundle kept in a drawer, can turn a lost morning into a two minute inconvenience. Make sure someone knows where it is and that the bundle has not expired. Ask Halima about the time the backup router was found, triumphantly, with zero shillings of airtime.
For power, a small UPS on the router and key computers buys time during short blackouts and lets people save their work during long ones.
Decide your manual fallback in advance
For every critical process, agree what happens if the system is down for an hour or a day:
Sales: a paper receipt book and a way to record M-Pesa payments for entry later
Customer service: a phone list and a shared notebook for logging enquiries
Payroll and payments: deadlines planned with a buffer, never on the very last day
Key documents: offline copies of the few files you cannot work without
Write this down on one page and keep printed copies, because a continuity plan stored only in the cloud is a lovely joke at precisely the wrong moment.
Communicate early
When something is down, tell people. Staff need to know whether to wait or switch to the fallback. Customers appreciate honesty: a quick message saying "our system is down, we are taking orders by phone" beats silence. Agree who is responsible for these messages so you are not sending four contradictory WhatsApp broadcasts.
Learn from every outage
Afterwards, spend ten minutes asking what happened, how long it took to notice, what worked and what did not. Update the checklist. Each small outage becomes practice for a big one.
Your next step: print the five-question checklist above and stick it next to the router. Then ask Omondi to read it before he reaches for the power button. If your own business systems fall over every time the internet sneezes, good IT and software services can design them to fail more gracefully. The router will thank you.