When Cloudflare Goes Down: Why Every Tech Stack Needs a Backup Plan

Yesterday’s Cloudflare outage was a powerful reminder of how dependent the modern internet has become on a small number of core infrastructure providers. Within minutes, websites went offline, APIs stopped responding, and users around the world were met with errors instead of experiences. For many businesses, nothing was “broken” in their own code or servers. The problem was further upstream: a single provider that normally accelerates and protects traffic suddenly became a bottleneck. When Cloudflare went down, the businesses that depended on it went down with it. This isn’t a story about avoiding Cloudflare. It’s a reminder that even the most advanced platforms can fail, and that every serious digital product needs a backup plan.

Cloudflare Is Still Worth Using

Cloudflare remains one of the strongest options for DNS, CDN, security and performance on the market. It helps websites load faster, protects against attacks, and simplifies how developers ship and scale applications globally. Most days, Cloudflare is invisible because it simply works. It absorbs attacks, optimizes traffic and keeps latency low. That reliability is exactly why so many teams chose it in the first place. The outage doesn’t change those strengths. What it does change is how we should think about risk. Depending entirely on a single edge provider, no matter how good, creates a hidden vulnerability that only becomes visible when something goes wrong.

The Real Risk: Overreliance on One Provider

The businesses most affected yesterday were the ones that built everything around Cloudflare as a single, central point of failure. DNS, CDN, routing and security all flowed through the same place. When that place had trouble, everything behind it went dark. Applications, databases and microservices might have been healthy and running, but users couldn’t reach them. From the outside, it didn’t matter how good the backend was if the edge layer was unavailable. This is the real lesson: resilience does not come from assuming a provider will always be online. It comes from designing systems that can survive when a provider is not.

What the Outage Teaches About Resilience

Incidents like this raise important questions for any team running a digital product: What happens if our DNS provider stops responding? Can we still serve traffic if our main CDN has an issue? Is our status page reachable if our main edge provider is down? Do we have a clear plan for what to do in the first minutes of an outage? For many, the honest answer is that there is no tested plan yet. Resilience often starts with small, practical decisions: separating where your status page is hosted, thinking about secondary DNS, and avoiding designs where a single external service controls every path to your application. None of these changes remove risk completely, but they can significantly reduce the impact of the next large-scale incident.

Building a More Resilient Strategy

The goal is not to abandon Cloudflare. For most businesses, Cloudflare will continue to be an important part of a modern, secure and fast stack. The real shift is in strategy. A more resilient approach means accepting that any provider can fail and planning around that reality. It means exploring backup options, documenting failover paths and making sure communication channels to users do not depend on the same systems that might be affected. Technology will keep improving, but outages will never disappear completely. The companies that handle them best are those that assume they will happen and prepare in advance. Yesterday’s Cloudflare problem was a disruption, but it can also be a turning point. It’s an opportunity to rethink architecture, reduce hidden dependencies and design a setup that keeps your business online even when part of the internet goes offline.