Multiday outages are increasingly inevitable
Here’s the situation: multiday outages are no longer rare. In fact, they’re becoming part of the modern business game, whether we like it or not. The more digital your infrastructure, the more risk you carry. You might be running 24/7 systems on global networks. You might be dependent on APIs, cloud services, or integrated third-party platforms. And if one breaks down, intentionally or not, you’re losing money by the minute.
The hard truth? Businesses already lose about $400 billion a year globally due to unplanned downtime, according to Oxford Economics. That’s the real cost of inertia. Sitting back, hoping things won’t go wrong, is no longer a responsible option. Whether driven by software glitches, cyberattacks, or power failures, these outages can seriously disrupt revenue, customer trust, and brand credibility.
For C-level leaders, this is a call to evolve beyond basic disaster recovery plans. You need comprehensive continuity plans designed for a multiday outage reality. The ones who survive and thrive will be those who approach risk management with precision planning and fast execution. That’s where agility feeds resilience. If your business can recover faster than your competitors, you win.
Multiday outages can arise from a range of causes
Outages aren’t always dramatic cyberattacks pulled from movie plots. Yes, in 2023, MGM Resorts got hit hard by a ransomware attack from groups like Scattered Spider and ALPHV, disabling everything from casino slot machines to mobile room access. But that’s just one type of failure. The CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 wasn’t criminal. It was a simple software update error. Still, that mistake triggered global service disruptions across industries.
Your systems can also be collateral damage. Take what happened to Capital One and several others, knocked offline for multiple days because their vendor, Fidelity Information Services (FIS), had a power outage and hardware failure. The impact was significant, to companies and customers alike. Same goes for McDonald’s, where a third-party config change caused a global outage.
These examples make one thing clear: even if you’re doing everything right internally, your risk is tied to entities you don’t control. As infrastructure grows more interconnected, your weakest link often sits outside your firewall. That’s why supplier risk management is critical operations strategy.
Comprehensive preparation and scenario planning are invaluable
Preparation beats hindsight every time. When major outages hit, and they will, the companies that recover fast are the ones that already did the homework. Good incident preparation has to be wide-ranging, drawing input from engineering, security, legal, operations, and communications. Multidisciplinary collaboration is the foundation of a serious continuity plan.
Your playbook needs to go beyond checklists. Routine tabletop exercises are essential. These help leadership teams stress-test their assumptions and timing. You’re preparing for what’s disruptive and unexpected. That’s what Sebastian Straub, Principal Solutions Architect at N2WS, gets at when he talks about the “black swan” factor. You can’t prepare for every specific failure, but you can build a system that adapts when a curveball hits.
The goal here is building response capacity into every layer of the organization. That’s preparation you can act on.
Effective incident response depends on leadership
When systems go down, your team doesn’t have hours to organize. They have minutes to execute. That’s why response leadership and communication structure must already be locked in, before problems start. Quentin Rhoads-Herrera, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Platforms at Stratascale, puts it simply: every company needs a clear incident commander to take lead when crisis hits.
This leader owns decision flow and coordination, making sure that all relevant teams, from infrastructure to executive leadership, get activated. Any delay in pushing the initial alert creates confusion and wastes critical time. As Sebastian Straub points out, too many teams hesitate to raise the flag early enough. This early gap often becomes the reason situations spiral beyond control.
Hierarchy matters here, not for control’s sake, but for speed. Everyone should know who to report to and what their responsibility is under pressure. If your staff is waiting for clarity while systems are failing, you’re already behind. That’s why role clarity can’t be ambiguous or left to interpretation when the outage happens.
Incident command structure and early escalation mechanisms are enterprise survival architecture.
Consistent communication is vital yet challenging
Communication under stress is where many companies fail. When systems go down and information is incomplete, it’s easy to delay messaging, or worse, say the wrong thing. But clarity, speed, and consistency in communication are fundamental to maintaining trust with customers, investors, and internal teams during a multiday outage.
Eric Schmitt, Global CISO at Sedgwick, emphasizes that communication is often one of the weakest areas in these scenarios. You need a message that reflects what you do know, acknowledges what you don’t, and provides a firm commitment to share more as soon as it becomes available. That requires discipline and preparation.
Quentin Rhoads-Herrera, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Platforms at Stratascale, reinforces this idea: transparency, paired with precise language, helps earn confidence, even when you’re delivering bad news. A vague or inconsistent message damages credibility. But when you build communication into incident response plans ahead of time, involving legal and public relations teams, it’s easier to hit the mark under pressure.
C-level leaders need to lead this function, making sure it’s not delegated too low in the organization. Whether you’re communicating every few hours or once a day, the rhythm and tone matter. You don’t need to reveal everything, but you do need to show that you’re accountable and in control.
Sustaining personnel during high-pressure outages
Multiday outages test both systems and people. Extended incident response efforts often mean long shifts, disrupted routines, and a high-stress environment where decisions carry consequences. If you don’t manage the team’s energy, attention suffers, and mistakes follow.
Leadership must track how many hours people are working, enforce breaks, and rotate teams when possible. Ignoring warning signs, fatigue, burnout, or stress, risks more than just morale. It compromises the ability to think clearly and act decisively during high-stakes recovery.
Quentin Rhoads-Herrera shared a real-world example of a company that responded well: putting up staff in nearby hotels, providing catered meals, and rotating teams in and out. No special perks, just basic readiness to support a focused team.
Executives need to create a culture where people feel safe acknowledging pressure and raising their hand when they need a pause. This also includes setting expectations: it’s better to surface small problems early than to hide issues and create large ones later. People perform at their best when they know leadership has their back, not just when things are going well, but especially when they’re not.
Systematic postmortems turn outages into learning opportunities
Once the outage is over, too many companies move on without taking time to review what actually happened. That’s a mistake. Postmortems are not about blame, they’re about understanding and improvement. The insights you get from a structured, honest review can directly strengthen your systems, your teams, and your next response.
Sebastian Straub, Principal Solutions Architect at N2WS, is clear on this: avoiding or downplaying the root issue only weakens your future position. Teams need to review exactly what went wrong, what worked, and what broke under pressure. Every part of the response, from technical remediation to communications, should be on the table.
Quentin Rhoads-Herrera, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Platforms at Stratascale, reinforces the importance of factual analysis. That means gathering and presenting hard evidence, timelines, team actions, and decision points without filtering or spinning the narrative. This is where executive leadership plays a critical role, by creating a space where people can be transparent without fearing personal or political consequences.
For C-suite leaders, the postmortem is your best tool for continuous operational evolution. It forces planning to adapt and evolve. Skip this step, and you’re more likely to repeat the same failures when the next incident hits. Build the habit, document findings, update plans, and move forward stronger. That’s how resilience gets real.
The risk of recurring multiday outages is growing
Outage risks are rising fast. More companies now depend on third-party vendors across every function, cloud, payments, logistics, data. Each of those partners is a potential failure point. When one goes down, the effect can cascade across industries. We’ve seen it with FIS, CrowdStrike, and other major players.
Add to that an increase in severe cyberattacks and climate-related incidents, and the pressure on uptime reliability only intensifies. Threat landscapes are shifting. Supply chains are more fragile. Systems built to operate with minimal slack are now exposed in ways that demand more sophisticated preparation.
From an executive standpoint, this means funding business continuity beyond compliance. It means rethinking the role of vendor audits, security protocols, and failure detection. Treat resilience as a competitive advantage. This means building trust in your ability to respond to anything.
The bottom line
If you’re leading at the executive level, your focus shouldn’t be avoiding every outage. What matters is how quickly and decisively your business can respond when things go sideways, and they will.
Invest in preparation. Not just in systems, but in people, culture, and process. Build plans that work across disciplines, with clear ownership and fast communication. Back those plans with the support teams need to operate under pressure, and keep operating for days if they have to.
Outages are stress tests. They surface weak points and expose blind spots. That’s valuable data. Use it. Learn from it. Adjust. Because the companies that respond well limit the damage and they gain trust, stability, and long-term advantage.
You can’t control when the next outage hits. You can control how ready you are.
