On June 12, 2025, the internet blinked. Email vanished, apps froze, and many of us lost contact with our digital coworkers (both AI and human). The world felt it instantly; businesses stalled, teams scrambled, and digital operations everywhere took a hit. 

Felt a little like deja vu. Does anyone remember July 19, 2024?

The June 12 outage proved again that anyone and everyone can experience an incident. What sets leaders apart is how quickly they recover, with AI and automation giving teams a jump start.   This isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a business mandate. In a world where digital services are the backbone of everything, a single provider’s hiccup can ripple across your entire operation. The real cost goes beyond immediate dollar signs and eats away at trust and reputation.

And while full-blown, systemic outages like these might be rare, they are inevitable. Recovery, redundancy, and reliability are your friends during these trying times. Let’s talk about why.

Preparation and knowledge are the keys to rapid recovery

When systems faltered, it wasn’t just email that disappeared. Teams lost access to collaboration tools, AI workflows, and critical business apps—all in one swoop. The problem isn’t as simple as vendor or cloud lock-in. Nor is it as easily fixed as making sure you have redundancy across providers or regions.

Here’s why: even when you stay up, your tools that you depend on may not. And that depends on – you guessed it – their dependencies. So what do you do?

Look within first. Start by mapping out your dependencies. Know which services rely on which providers. Know which services are dependent on others and how you correlate failure across these discrete pieces of tech.

Once you’ve got this part sorted, start mapping out the dependencies of your techstack. Pressure test or chaos engineer failure patterns. What works without GCP? If AWS has a blip, where does that leave you? Knowing is half the battle. And it can surface opportunities for you to harden your system against failure in the future.

But knowing your dependencies is just the start. When things go sideways, how you communicate can make or break your response and for that, you may need to look at some redundancy.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy

The first question during any service disruption is always: “Is it just us?” On June 12, confusion spread fast. Customers, employees, and partners all wanted answers—right now. Silence only made things worse.

Redundancy across all your tooling may not be cost-effective. How much would that waste in duplicate solutions, just in the event of a failure like this? But redundancy across communication methods is a must. 

On June 12, people couldn’t send emails. Chat to their colleagues. Mobile apps crashed. And many were left asking, what’s next and who has answers?

Backup communications are key. Here are some things to consider:

1. Have a plan: Part of any comprehensive incident response plan is understanding how a team communicates during an issue. Are you in-person? Chat-first? Video-first? Where do you drop notes and collaborate? Documenting this ahead of time can save you from scrambling when times are tough.
2. Communicate across surfaces: Say you’re chat-first. But then chat is down. You need a backup plan. Redundancy in communication channels can be a lifesaver, especially if all the information you need exists across these surfaces. If you can communicate via a tool’s UI, mobile, chat, or video, that broadens your options and allows you to stay flexible no matter what life throws your way.
3. Let AI take some of the burden: Communicating during an incident is hard enough. It’s harder when your channels are impacted AND you need to keep key stakeholders in the loop. Let GenAI take some of that pressure off by drafting tailored communications for you such as status and stakeholder updates.

If you’ve got your plans set, dependencies mapped, and key redundancies ready in the event of a failure, you’re more prepared to respond when a problem hits. But what if you could have resilient tools that kept working, even under the toughest circumstances? The partners you choose matter, especially when things get messy.

Reliability is the real question

No one can predict every outage, but you can choose partners who help you recover and establish strong relationships with them. PagerDuty is that partner for nearly 70% of the Fortune 100. We were steady June 12, July 19, and every other day since we started over a decade ago. Reliability is part of our DNA. It’s core to what we do every day. We’re always there for our customers.

If that’s the relationship you want with a business partner, don’t just shop for features or flashy UI, look for proven results. The June 12 outage proved that no one is immune to disruption. Knowing your dependencies, communicating clearly with redundancy built in, and choosing the right partners are key to weathering an unpredictable storm. These aren’t just best practices. They’re your insurance policy.

Want to build a more proactive, resilient future? Don’t wait for the next outage, because your customers won’t.

Let’s make resilience your superpower. Connect with PagerDuty to see how our AI-first platform keeps your business running, no matter what the world throws your way.