Venture funding dried up, ad budgets collapsed, and enterprise ITInformation technology — the use of computers, networks, and software in organizations. projects were cut. Startups that had raised in 2007 suddenly faced down rounds or shutdowns; survivors like Airbnb and Uber later credited the crisis with forcing leaner product focus. Cloud adoption accelerated as CFOs demanded opex over capex — a tailwind for AWSAmazon Web Services — the dominant cloud platform for compute, storage, and managed infrastructure. and SaaSSoftware as a Service — applications delivered over the internet on a subscription basis..

Lehman Monday is the date developers cite when startup funding and enterprise sales froze overnight.

The crisis reshaped startup survival strategies and accelerated the shift to cloud opex models.