Another week, another outage; this week with Cloudflare. A ballooning configuration file triggered cascading failures across their global network, taking down major sites and apps for hours. And what was the collective response?
A shrug. Maybe a few brief headlines.
Somehow, we’ve reached a point where widespread internet disruption barely raises an eyebrow. But this should concern us, whether you’re a 50-person company running a simple SaaS stack or a national enterprise with multi-cloud architecture.
The outage this week wasn’t a cyberattack. It wasn’t a massive breach. It was a routine change gone wrong, and it broke the internet for millions.
If it can happen there, it can happen to you and the ripple effects of disrupted business and customer concern can be endless. That’s exactly why IT leaders need to stop treating outages like background noise and start treating them like the strategic risks they are.
What IT Leaders Should Do Right Now:
1. Map Your Dependencies
- Know exactly which providers your systems rely on (DNS, CDN, cloud, auth, billing)
- Document single points of failure you’re unwillingly inheriting
- If Cloudflare drops, what’s the actual impact on your business?
2. Build for Failure, Not Perfection
- Assume upstream vendors can and will fail
- Use multi-region or multi-provider designs where it matters
- Add circuit breakers and rate limits to avoid a global issue cascading into your stack
3. Review Your Incident Playbooks
- Does your team know what to do if your CDN, DNS, or identity provider goes down?
- Who communicates internally and externally?
- Can you operate even partially degraded?
- If you haven’t exercised the plan in the last 12 months, you don’t have a plan
4. Validate Your Monitoring Blind Spots
- Do you get alerted when your upstream providers fail, or only when your own systems do?
- Add synthetic testing that hits external endpoints you depend on
- Don’t rely on Social Media or other channels to tell you something’s broken
5. Re-Evaluate SLAs and Business Impact
- Most cloud SLAs protect their availability, not your actual uptime
- Tie each dependency to a real business impact (revenue, orders, patient access, customer experience)
- Right-size your redundancy based on impact, not vendor marketing
The Cloudflare outage wasn’t a cyberattack, it was a normal operational change that cascaded into global disruption, proving once again how fragile “always on” really is.
We may be numb to outages, but we cannot afford to be indifferent. Because going into 2026, resilience isn’t an engineering problem. It’s an executive mandate.
