It’s the most common complaint in corporate America.

This meeting could have been an email.

Alas… 

Today the email couldn’t even be an email. (So everyone held a meeting about it.)

Around 1 p.m. Eastern, Microsoft’s business email went dark. More than 130,000 people reported Outlook problems. Teams, OneDrive and Copilot joined the line.

Somewhere a vice president typed “per my last email” and hit send. Nobody had to read it. 

A small mercy. 

Also, a live demo of what I’ve dubbed the Uptime Imperative. 

Today let’s walk through who gets paid when the internet breaks, and two things we’re doing about it.

Uptime Wars 

We named it last October, two days after a bad setting at Amazon froze a third of the web for 15 hours. 

I wrote then: “Outages like we saw on October 20 will happen again.”

They did. Microsoft, nine days later. Cloudflare, twice in a month. Amazon again in July. Microsoft four more times this year. Then today.

The Uptime Imperative thesis is simple. 

There are TWO ways to make money in infrastructure. You can sell the thing people use. Or you can sell the promise it never stops. As the first business gets more and more crowded, the second gets more valuable.

Simple. 

Let’s look at what’s happened since… 

One Year Later

The first business indeed got crowded. 

The cloud doubled in two years, and everyone from Oracle to SpaceX moved in.

The second business? It got rich. 

Vertiv, which makes backup power and cooling for data centers, doubled its orders. Generac, best known for generators in suburban driveways, signed a $2.4 billion deal to keep Amazon’s data centers running. Caterpillar’s power generation sales jumped 72%, driven by data centers.

All that money buys one thing: the promise that the lights stay on. 

And the price of that promise is still rising.

Two years ago, downtime cost the world’s 2,000 largest companies $400 billion a year. Now it’s $600 billion. That’s $900,000 an hour, per company.

And the bill is set to keep climbing: more users, more AI agents, more machines, same old bottlenecks.

The crowd keeps growing… and the second business keeps sending the bill.

Two Things We’re Doing

Here’s how we’re playing it.

The first is practical: making sure you hear from us no matter what.

If Microsoft can lose your inbox, it can lose our letters too. So we’ve been building alternative routes. 

Text alerts. Email can crash.Your phone still buzzes. Our VIP text line sends a free under-the-radar ticker every Tuesday, plus breaking alerts.

Second thing? Hunting for the next opportunities in the age uptime.

The first wave went to the obvious suppliers of the promise that it never stops: backup power, generators and cooling. 

The next wave is ramping up. 

I’m watching:

• The grid’s secret nervous system. Private networks keep the grid talking when everything else goes dark. Only a handful of companies hold the airwaves.

• The deep-sea mechanics. Cables, oil rigs, wind farms, mineral beds and navy patrols all break down where no human can reach. When the seafloor calls for help, only a handful of robot companies pick up.

• The digital smoke detectors. Software and hardware that catches outages before your customers do is coming online with a premium. 

More on that soon.