OPINION | By Christian Riddell, CEO of TBN

On Thursday, June 12, a rare global outage took down portions of the internet—Spotify, Discord, and even core parts of Google’s own services went offline. This outage also affected TBN’s platform.

The cause? A misfired update within the Google Cloud environment. The impact? Widespread, but short-lived: total downtime that lasted just about two hours.

While our goal is always 100% uptime, 100% of the time, the reality is that even the best systems in the world can encounter unexpected issues. We know that any downtime—no matter how brief—can be frustrating at best and downright stressful at worst, especially when you’re in the middle of serving customers, coordinating dispatch, and supporting drivers. Two hours may seem like a short blip on paper, but when you’re in the trenches, trying to keep things moving, it can feel like an eternity.

This experience for us at TBN, it was an important reminder —not of the fragility of SAAS—but of its power.

Because in those two hours, Google’s world-class engineering teams identified the issue, mitigated it, and restored functionality for millions of users around the globe. No waiting for someone to “swing by the office.” No tape backups. No multi-day scramble. Just fast, focused, expert response.

That’s why we chose Google as our infrastructure partner from day one. They are the biggest, the best, and the most reliable. And in the rare event that something does go wrong, we know—with absolute confidence—that the smartest people in the business are already on it.

“We chose Google as our partner because they are the biggest and the best in the business. We know, without any doubt, that in the rare case that there is a service interruption, we have the very best working the issue.”

At TBN, we’ve spent years building software that empowers motorcoach companies to run smarter, sell better, and stay ahead. That includes quoting platforms, dispatch systems, and operations tools that are all hosted in the cloud—not on a server in the back closet.

That choice matters more than most operators realize. Because I’ve been in this industry long enough to know what it’s like when an on-site server goes down. The fix isn’t hours—it’s days. You’re calling the IT guy, trying to get a part shipped, hoping the backup works, and watching your team grind to a halt.

Compare that to a two-hour Google incident where 20,000+ engineers were working to fix the problem, where what would have been a disaster for a server in the back office, was little more than a long lunch.

That’s the promise of SAAS—and why it’s no longer the future, it’s the standard across nearly every software driven industry.

We often talk about motorcoach businesses being behind the curve when it comes to technology. But the truth is, staying on aging infrastructure isn’t just a technology decision—it’s a business risk. Every day you delay that transition is a day you gamble your business on outdated systems and a single point of failure.

At TBN, our goal has never been just to modernize software—we’re here to modernize expectations. Reliability, speed, and real-time access to your data isn’t a luxury. It’s the minimum standard you should expect from the systems that keep your company running.

Last week’s outage didn’t shake our, or our users, confidence in SAAS. It reinforced it.

And for every operator still wondering if the cloud is “safe,” let me just say this: I’d rather trust buildings full of Google engineers than a server under a desk supported by a company across town to keep my business on the road.