The world found itself in disaster mode once again Monday after Amazon Web Services, one of the world’s largest cloud service providers, suffered an outage. This is a big deal as AWS provides the critical services that a lot of apps and websites use to operate. When it fell, so did the others.
Obviously, this was bad news for Texas restaurants that rely on point-of-sale systems, third-party delivery services, and apps for their daily operations and sales. Rafael Nasr of Houston Mediterranean fast-casual chain Craft Pita noticed something was up at around 7 a.m. when the New York Times alerted the AWS outage.
“My wife works in tech, and I know how big AWS is, so I knew it would affect some part of my day,” Nasr told Chron.
And it did: The outage shut down Craft Pita’s online ordering and third-party delivery capability. Nasr also found he wasn’t able to do payroll via Toast. When he huddled his team that day, he told them to expect a lot of phone calls.
“We lost 25 percent of our business yesterday,” Nasr said. “You just have to grit your teeth and go through with it. Thankfully, we had a good amount of catering orders yesterday.”
Restaurants in Greater Houston, Texas, and across the country reported similar or even worse issues. JD’s Hamburgers in Fort Worth told KXAS-TV that the outage knocked out credit card payments. JD’s had to fill out handwritten tickets as a backup plan.
AWS managed to right itself around 3 p.m., though not entirely. The outage was a stark reminder of the pitfalls of the post-Covid restaurant economy. Many have pivoted a significant chunk, if not all of their business toward pick-up and delivery orders. When the tech fails, Nasr pointed out there’s no insurance or backup plan.
“It just goes to show when you build your business around relying on these third-party marketplaces, that’s the consequence,” Nasr said. “You’re so reliant on the technology that when the technology doesn’t work, you’re SOL.”
