The incidents involving Cloudflare and CrowdStrike have directly exposed the fragility of an increasingly centralized digital infrastructure. The Cloudflare outage, in particular, disrupted the morning operations of countless companies across the country. Many faced slowdowns, access failures, internal system instability, and interruptions in workflows that depend on APIs connected to the platform. In several cases, entire teams were unable to perform essential activities until the service was restored.
This type of impact demonstrates that technological blackouts are no longer exceptions. They are part of the current dynamics of the digital environment. The central question has changed. The discussion is no longer about whether another global instability will occur. The appropriate question now is when it will happen again. And the answer depends directly on an organization’s ability to maintain its operations even when external providers fail.
In this context, BCP plays an indispensable role. An effective continuity plan must be active and up to date. It must be tested, revised, and clearly communicated to all teams. Its function is to guide fast decisions, avoid improvisation, and reduce the extent of damage when inevitable events occur.
The lack of redundancy, dependence on single providers, and contracts without contingency provisions significantly increase organizational vulnerability.
Essential continuity elements include:
• Mapping critical processes and systems
• Planning realistic outage scenarios
• Performing periodic simulation tests
• Establishing minimum redundancy for essential functions
• Assessing vendor risks
• Including contractual SLA and recovery provisions
• Ensuring organized and systemic communication
• Integrating legal, IT, information security, and senior management
Areas such as digital governance, data protection, compliance, and risk management are fundamental in helping companies structure their internal routines, develop internal policies, create response flows, and strengthen preventive culture. These disciplines contribute to building safer environments that are better prepared to handle significant disruptions.
Furthermore, the Cloudflare incident reinforces the importance of identifying single points of failure. When an organization relies on a single provider for DNS, CDN, authentication, or routing, any external instability can interrupt everything from simple operations to critical processes that sustain the business. Understanding these interdependencies is essential for prioritizing continuity actions and reducing impact.
Another relevant point concerns corporate contracts. Many organizations discovered during recent outages that their supplier agreements lacked clear contingency mechanisms, minimum availability levels, communication protocols, or responsibility matrices. The absence of these elements creates technical and legal risks that can intensify the effects of a crisis.
Recent incidents show that operational resilience is no longer a competitive advantage. It is a basic requirement for operating in a complex and interdependent digital ecosystem. Companies that treat BCP as a continuous and integrated practice are better positioned to adapt, respond, and maintain their operations even in scenarios of widespread instability.
