CloudFlare outage and ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’
After the latest CloudFlare outage we are reminded how much of the internet is dependent on one conglomerate service provider. This outage will not have surprised anyone that was paying attention to last month’s AWS East outage that impacted much of the entire internet.
These incidents raise the question if smaller companies and startups should be using these large providers. On the one hand, we see the impact of an outage and are stuck sitting on our hands waiting for unknown engineers in unknown datacenters to make unknown fixes. On the other hand, ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’; IT leaders select large vendors due to their ubiquitous presence in the industry.
Where does this leave small companies? How do IT leaders respond to leadership who is asking why we made that choice. This is not an uncommon choice; we select Microsoft, AWS and others based on this model. But are we being sheep and just following the herd blindly?
It’s important to ask what happens if we zig when everyone else zags. There are other options for all the above providers (and more). When we play out the scenario, however, we realize that all vendors have outages, even going back to the days before cloud where we used datacenters, there were outages. When these outages occurred, it put the company in a spotlight as being the only one with an outage.
What often gets lost in these conversations is that choosing a giant vendor isn’t inherently a bad decision; it’s the lack of intentionality behind that choice that becomes problematic. Most startups don’t actually select AWS, Google, or Microsoft so much as they drift into them. An investor used them. A devops engineer used them at their last job. A friend recommended them. Before long, an entire business is running on infrastructure that no one ever consciously evaluated.
The outages we’re seeing should serve less as a warning about the vendors themselves and more as a reminder that vendor selection is a strategic decision, not an afterthought. Even if the “right answer” today is to stay with the big players, leadership should at least understand the implications of that choice. Downtime, shared fate, support limitations, pricing unpredictability — these aren’t edge cases, they’re part of the operating reality.
For small companies, the goal isn’t to avoid the big vendors. It’s to avoid treating them as infallible. This means building a level of internal awareness about which systems matter most, what the blast radius of an outage looks like, and what expectations should be set with customers when the inevitable happens. These are not technical exercises; they are organizational ones.
There is also a cultural component here. When an outage hits, teams that have thought about resilience ahead of time respond with clarity and discipline. Teams that haven’t tend to respond with noise, speculation, and finger-pointing. The vendor becomes the scapegoat, even though the real issue is the absence of a plan.
In time, alternatives may mature. Smaller, more specialized providers may gain a foothold. Multi-cloud strategies might become more accessible to early-stage teams as tooling improves. But until then, the practical answer isn’t to abandon the giants necessarily (although that may be this author’s preference), it’s to use them with intention and with leadership alignment, rather than by default.
