The AWS Outage This Week: How It Affected Sales and How an AI Seller Could Have Saved You
Solutions like Biky, offer a way to keep sales going even when the “cloud world” fails.
The digital world was shaken this week when AWS experienced a massive outage that took down applications, backend services, and online commerce platforms.
For a company whose sales department depends on cloud systems, this is not just a “technical issue”: it’s a loss of revenue, customers, and reputation.
What exactly happened with AWS?
The Amazon Web Services outage had characteristics that make it especially relevant for sales and digital operations:
- The failure generated “empty logs” that were not automatically repaired.
- More than 4 million users reported problems.
- The affected platforms included messaging apps, social networks, banks, streaming services, and commerce platforms.
- The impact was not just a “momentary drop”: many services were left with processing backlogs, and losses may be estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars in interrupted digital activity.
In short: a cloud infrastructure outage can partially shut down your sales, service, and operational channels in an instant.
How does an outage like this affect sales and business operations?
The effects on sales and commercial operations are multiple and deep:
1. Direct loss of revenue
When your frontend (shop, chat, landing page) or backend (database, CRM, personalization system) are suspended, leads start disappearing. Abandoned carts, unanswered chats, unsent forms.
Every minute of downtime can mean tens of thousands of dollars depending on the business’s volume.
2. Deterioration of customer experience
If a customer tries to contact you via chat, WhatsApp, web, or app and receives no response, brand perception suffers.
In the long run, this reduces retention, increases churn, and raises CAC (customer acquisition cost).
3. Human team overload when systems return
When the system comes back online, many conversations pile up, the team is overloaded, response times lengthen, and leads go cold. This reduces the conversion rate.
4. Interruption of automated funnels
Campaigns that were running “on autopilot” stop: newsletter sends, nurturing workflows, chatbots that depend on cloud services. This delays the sales pipeline.
5. Impact on key metrics
- First Response Time (FRT) rises dramatically.
- Qualified leads decrease.
- Lost opportunities increase.
- CAC goes up.
- Final close rate goes down.
6. Indirect and reputational costs
It’s not only about what you don’t sell during the downtime hour—the effect lasts for weeks afterward: clients left without support, unresolved questions, complaints, negative posts.
Reputation damage costs much more than technical downtime.
How an AI seller would be a solution to mitigate this kind of risk
Here’s where Biky’s value proposition appears: not just as “another sales software,” but as a resilience layer for your commercial channel.
A) 24/7, multichannel operation with backup logic
Biky operates as a conversational AI agent capable of handling chats, WhatsApp, Instagram, web chat, etc.
If parts of your main infrastructure (for example, your CRM or database on AWS) become inaccessible, Biky can respond, qualify, record data, and maintain conversational operations.
B) Integrated own CRM
Biky has its own internal CRM. This means you are not exclusively dependent on your external CRM that may be hosted on AWS or another platform that experiences a blackout.
During an interruption, having an alternative operational CRM can save continuity.
C) Your own sales suite
Biky has its own commercial suite (chat, CDP, funnels, CRM), reducing exclusive dependency on infrastructures that may collapse.
Additionally, by integrating with other systems, you can set up a “plan B” so that leads engaged during the outage are temporarily recorded in Biky and then synchronized when everything comes back online.
D) Automated funnels that react
When your system is down, Biky can activate automated routes:
“Thank you for your patience,” or “Our system is momentarily out of service, but we’ll get back to you shortly,” which keeps the customer “in play” instead of disappearing.
E) Conversion data and insights even during the outage
Even if parts of the stack are down, Biky’s interface can continue collecting information, meaning that when systems are restored, you already have fresh leads, context, and follow-ups ready for your human team to take over. This reduces the impact of “recovery.”
Quantified impact: figures and estimates
To measure the impact, we can rely on what media and expert estimates report:
- More than 4 million users affected.
- Economic damages are estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars when adding up global productivity, sales, and reputation losses.
- A critical factor is dependency. AWS holds around 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market.
- In a digital sales environment, every minute of downtime can translate into a significant percentage of the daily pipeline. For example, if your online store normally generates 100 leads per hour and your close rate is 5%, a two-hour outage could cost you 10 lost sales (plus the customer lifetime value).
- With Biky, in interruption scenarios, you could at least keep the conversational channel open, allowing those leads to stay “warm” and nurtured, maintaining follow-up rates.
The AWS outage has been a wake-up call for all digital companies: depending on a single provider or system is a business risk. Sales, customer service, and conversion are all at stake.
This is where an AI seller becomes a strategic lever: by offering automated conversation, internal CRM, and operational resilience, it gives you a safety net so that when the “cloud world” fails, your sales line doesn’t shut down.