When Slack went down, some teams kept collaborating. When Asana crashed, some managers kept prioritizing. The difference wasn't better technology backup plans.
If you're reading this after scrambling through several hours without your collaboration tools, customer dashboards, or project management platforms, you just lived through an expensive lesson about organizational capability.
This morning's AWS outage took down Snapchat, Roblox, Ring, Fortnite, and dozens of business-critical platforms. Thousands of companies discovered in real time which teams could function when their technology disappeared and which ones basically stopped working.
The revealing part wasn't which companies had better disaster recovery protocols. It was which teams had built the problem-solving muscles to route around obstacles without waiting for IT to restore their tools.
AWS outages expose something most organizations don't see during normal operations. When everything works, automation and platforms mask capability gaps. You can't tell whether your team is genuinely collaborative or just good at using Slack. You don't know if your managers can actually prioritize or if they've just learned to follow Asana's automated workflows.
Then the infrastructure fails, and suddenly the truth emerges. Some teams immediately shift to workarounds. They text, call, use email, reconvene over Google Docs, find creative routing solutions. Other teams essentially freeze, waiting for their platforms to come back online.
The frozen teams aren't less intelligent or less motivated. They've just been operating in environments where technology dependency gradually replaced capability development.
Brookings Institution research on AI and workplace productivity found that while automation tools can boost efficiency by 15-30% for routine tasks, they also create a dangerous side effect. Over-reliance on AI systems reduces critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities over time.
The researchers call this "AI sycophancy," where systems align so closely with existing workflows that people stop questioning whether there might be better approaches. When those systems fail, teams that have been following automated suggestions suddenly don't know how to make decisions independently.
It just made it impossible to ignore. Organizations have been trading capability development for platform dependency for years. This morning's chaos was simply the bill coming due.
McKinsey research on organizational adaptability reveals something critical about how resilient companies approach technology. They don't avoid automation or resist platform adoption. Instead, they treat technology failures as diagnostic opportunities.
At one telecom company McKinsey studied, teams had become so dependent on escalation processes that a relatively minor decision got passed from team lead to manager to director to CEO four separate times. Nobody wanted to make the call because the automated approval systems had trained them to defer rather than decide.
The CEO's solution was telling. He scheduled all escalation meetings for 11:00 AM on Saturday mornings. Teams immediately started making more decisions themselves.
That's not about punishment. It's about forcing capability development by removing the easy automation option.
Organizations that navigate disruptions well have usually spent years creating what McKinsey calls "safety to fail" cultures. These aren't companies with better disaster recovery documentation. They're places where people practice problem-solving constantly, even when systems are working fine.
Sam Yagan, former CEO of Match.com, used to ask executives in performance reviews to describe their recent failures. If an executive couldn't point to failures that cost money, they didn't get bonuses. The message was clear: if you're not making mistakes, you're not taking appropriate risks or building problem-solving capabilities.
When Yagan himself made a $50 million acquisition mistake, he stood in front of the entire company and walked through what went wrong. People saw that he was still CEO. They learned that intelligent failures while trying to solve problems were not only acceptable but expected.
Not seminars about crisis response. Not documentation about disaster protocols. Actual repeated practice at solving problems under pressure, making decisions with incomplete information, and learning from failures fast enough that the lessons stick.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demonstrated this after the Tay bot disaster, when Twitter users taught Microsoft's AI to generate racist and misogynistic content. Besides shutting down the bot and apologizing, Nadella emailed the development team to make absolutely certain they understood they wouldn't be punished for taking the risk. His message: make sure you learn from mistakes, but keep taking appropriate risks.
Most organizations run disaster recovery drills for their technical systems. They test whether backups work, whether failover processes function, whether communication protocols activate correctly. Those are important.
But how many organizations run capability stress tests for their people?
What happens if your team can't access their AI-powered dashboards for a week? Can your managers still identify performance issues and development opportunities? What if your collaboration platform disappears? Do people know how to coordinate across departments without automated workflows?
This morning's AWS outage was an unplanned capability stress test. Some teams passed. Others discovered they've been operating with thinner capability margins than they realized.
A diagnostic assessment based on today's AWS outage patterns
The most resilient organizations treat disruptions as diagnostic information, not just problems to solve. They ask different questions after events like this morning's outage.
Which teams kept functioning and which ones froze? The difference reveals where you've built genuine problem-solving capabilities versus where you've built platform dependencies disguised as capabilities.
Where did managers demonstrate real prioritization judgment versus where did they just wait for their dashboards to come back online? That gap shows you exactly where development investment needs to go.
Which collaborative relationships survived without Slack and which ones turned out to be entirely tool-dependent? Those answers tell you whether you're building team chemistry or just team platform adoption.
Crisis management skills development doesn't happen through annual seminars or certification programs. It happens through continuous practice at making decisions, solving problems, and recovering from failures.
Organizations building these capabilities create systematic opportunities for people to practice judgment. They give managers real-time visibility into team performance so they can spot patterns and make adjustments without waiting for quarterly reviews. They build feedback loops into daily work so people learn from mistakes immediately rather than months later during performance discussions.
They develop individualized growth paths that build problem-solving capabilities specific to each person's role and challenges. They create collaborative environments where people practice working across boundaries even when their collaboration platforms are functioning perfectly.
It's building organizations where people develop capabilities continuously, so when disruptions inevitably happen, teams barely notice because they've been solving novel problems all along.
Every company dealing with AWS downtime today is calculating the cost in lost productivity, missed deadlines, and customer frustration. Those costs are real and they'll show up in various reports over the coming weeks.
But the more valuable insight from this morning is diagnostic. You just discovered which parts of your organization can genuinely problem-solve and which parts have been following automated prompts. You learned which managers can actually manage and which ones have been operating collaboration tools. You found out which teams have real chemistry and which ones have platform dependency.
That's not catastrophic information. It's a roadmap showing exactly where capability development needs to happen.
The organizations that treat this as a learning moment rather than just a disaster recovery exercise will emerge with stronger teams, more resilient processes, and people who've proven they can solve problems even when their usual tools disappear.
The ones that just wait for AWS to publish a post-mortem and then go back to normal will keep building platform dependencies until the next outage exposes the same gaps all over again.
Develop problem-solving muscles through continuous practice, not emergency response training. Real-time visibility, systematic skill development, and genuine collaboration that survives platform failures.
