The cloud services affected by the outage probably have no way to run locally.  Your data would be fine, but you just wouldn't be able to use them since they are cloud-only.  For instance, if YouTube went down, you couldn't do anything on your YouTube channel even if you have all your data intact.  In my old job, our data were stored locally and accessible to remote users via Internet.  If Internet went down, the local users could still access the data.  But that was a totally different scenario.  Nowadays, many people, even businesses, put all their data online that can only be used online.  A local data backup would not help.

I know this throws me into the Tin Hat Club, but this outage just demonstrates how fragile the Internet is, and how vulnerable we all are should a bad actor realize that.

Michael  Bad actors may also need Internet to work too, if they want to steal resources, for instance.  They wouldn't want to blow up the Internet so that nothing would work and no one could be stolen from.  They want to keep Internet running so their malware, phishing email, etc., would work.  This is the Internet warfare of today and most likely the future too.

Stealing IPs from governments, interfering elections, sowing discord in social media with fake AI, etc., all need Internet.  This is the kind of online warfare today, done totally in the dark by people who don't want anyone to know for months and years.  An outage like what we just had would last only 1-2 days.

The criminal "bad agent" will want to keep the internet.  The chaos "bad agent" doesn't need/care about the internet or any other utility infrastructure.  They will destroy because its fun or "for a cause", and then wonder later why they can't get their Starbucks latte or McDonalds quarter pounder & cheese.  SMH.

Sam & Kevin- yes, it’s the chaos bad actors, the Dark Knight’s Joker who just wants to watch the world burn that scares me. Or the more timely example of someone so deluded and fixated on self-pleasure that their apathy for everything else destroys huge swaths of our civilization.

Michael  We may already be having "huge destruction" now.  We just came out of a pandemic.  We have mass shootings that are almost weekly occurrences.  We have environmental destruction.  Etc.  The kind of world destruction we see in the movies is not necessarily how it would play out in our real world.  Pop culture often depicts world destruction as the result of some crazed James Bond villain who turns the world into a complete wasteland overrun by zombies.  I love seeing those as movies, TV shows, or video games, but those are just "romanticism," and are likely not how it would go down if the Earth would ever come to that.  The biggest proof of that was the pandemic we just went through.  It did NOT turn our world into a wasteland like The Last of Us (which is also about a deadly disease that wipes out much of the population, for those who haven't seen the show or the games).  And yet, the effect from the pandemic will be felt for years and decades to come.  Covid is another example of a silent killer too -- it doesn't make you sick right away, but only days and weeks later after you have spread the virus to many other people.

The Internet going down is exactly why I say businesses should have an OFFLINE way to at least run their core business functions... Contact manager, order entry, inventory lookup, etc. Nothing beats a good local database.

Richard  Internet is like water, gas, and electricity nowadays, so disruptions are unavoidable if Internet goes down, just like if you suddenly lose water, gas, or electricity.  Regarding having a way to run a business locally, I'm not sure that is easy or even possible for most businesses.  If YouTube goes down, you have no way to run your channel except waiting for it to come back on.  If Internet goes down, your student can't use your site.  Some apps and services have an "offline mode," but that's rare.

Kevin and that's understandable for an internet-based business like mine. However if you're a typical retail or office-based business you should have a system in place to run things so people aren't just sitting around with their fingers in their noses if the internet goes down... Even if that system is paper and pencil.

Richard  As I said, having a system that can both (1) run online normally, and (2) fall back to offline mode when Internet is down is not a trivial thing.  It would need both an online copy and an offline copy of the same database that can sync continuously to one another.  There is no such built-in feature in Access nor SQL Server.  Maybe high-end commercial services like Azure can do it.  In such an environment, having a local database would indeed become crucial.

I do that with some of the data for my business. For example, any changes to customer records, comments in the forums, etc. are almost immediately copied down to my office database. It's a form of backup but it allows me to also run reports and stuff locally without hitting the web server database. You can also mirror SQL Server, but I don't need to go that far. I can deal with a little downtime if things go sideways. I can restore from backup in an hour or two.

When we say a service like internet or electric goes down, we mean our local access to the service is interrupted.  To my knowledge, we have not witnessed the entire internet or power grid fail.  The back-up is often an alternative plan for access to the service, like a satellite ISP, or a generator.  These back-up plans are relatively simple to implement.  

If your "cloud" service gets breached or goes off-line, I would never want my only copies of my data to reside on someone else's computer, aka-the cloud.  If, for example, YouTube went down for an extended period, you could upload videos to another site, like Rumble.

I agree that, depending on circumstance, it is prudent to consider as much back-up capability as feasible.  If not, you run the risk of an extended outage that can result from leaving your business in someone else's hands.  They may not have your best interest's in mind.  I'm thinking Parler.

That's why I have copies of all of my videos on my own website.