By Resourcive
On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare experienced a global outage that disrupted major platforms, including ChatGPT, X, and thousands of other sites. According to CEO Matthew Prince’s post-mortem, the root cause was a configuration file that grew beyond expected thresholds in their threat-traffic management system. That triggered a software crash, not a cyberattack.
For mid-market and enterprise IT leaders, and the suppliers who support them, this incident highlights several lessons that directly influence how technology decisions should be made.
At Resourcive, we look at events like this through the lens of buyer value, supplier accountability, and real-world operational risk.
Even the most sophisticated infrastructure vendors experience failures. When a major provider like Cloudflare goes down, the downstream impact is immediate and widespread.
For IT and business leaders:
Don’t assume “large vendor = guaranteed resilience.”
Build visibility into how your applications, platforms, and security layers rely on upstream vendors like Cloudflare.
Include infrastructure-vendor failure scenarios in your business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
For suppliers and service providers:
Understand every dependency in your tech stack, and what breaks when your upstream vendor breaks.
Be proactive in educating clients on where these risks live and how you help mitigate them.
This outage is another reminder that modern IT is a chain, and the chain is only as strong as its quietest link.
Matthew Prince’s public explanation matters. When something this visible goes wrong, what buyers remember is not the outage, it’s how the vendor showed up afterward.
What organizations should watch for:
How quickly the vendor communicates
How clearly they explain what happened
How honestly they address root cause, failure points, and next steps
Whether they own the problem or spin it
What suppliers must internalize:
Your customers rely on you for context they cannot get directly from upstream vendors. Even if you didn’t cause the outage, silence creates confusion, and confusion erodes trust.
Clear communication during an incident is now a baseline expectation, not a “nice to have.”
The outage wasn’t caused by an edge-case cyber event, a novel exploit, or a sophisticated attack.
These are the types of failures most organizations overlook.
For buyers:
Ask vendors how they manage “small” changes, not just major upgrades.
Ensure your vendors have guardrails for internal change-management and testing around configuration updates, thresholds, and traffic rules.
For suppliers:
Incorporate change-risk awareness into your delivery methodology.
Talk to customers about how upstream vendor changes affect availability, performance, and security.
Small changes break big systems — this outage made that clear.
Our role as a Technology Value Creation Partner sits directly between suppliers and the organizations trying to buy from them. This incident reinforces the value of that position.
For end customers:
You need clarity on your vendor stack
You need visibility into your dependency chain
You need a framework to evaluate vendor resilience and risk
You need support planning for, and responding to, vendor-driven outages
For suppliers:
You need help reaching the right buyers
You need clearer articulation of your resilience and operating model
You need guidance on how to communicate through incidents and change
Resourcive bridges these gaps. That’s the opportunity, and responsibility, of sitting in the middle.
No provider can promise zero downtime. That’s not the game.
The real differentiators are:
preparation,
dependency awareness,
transparent communication, and
a grounded, operational understanding of risk.
The Cloudflare outage is not evidence of a broken internet, it’s a reminder that infrastructure failures are inevitable, and the organizations that win are the ones who prepare for them.
If you want help assessing your dependency map or improving how your organization navigates vendor risk, let’s talk.