Cloudflare Outage: Should You Go Multi-CDN?
As a DDoS testing and resilience consultancy, we routinely advise our clients to strengthen their architecture by using a reputable CDN like Cloudflare. After this week’s Cloudflare outage, however, many organizations are understandably asking themselves a new question:
Should we adopt a multi-CDN strategy instead of relying on a single provider?
For the vast majority of businesses, the answer is no.
Whether you build a strategy around a dedicated multi-CDN platform or combine multiple providers yourself—Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Azure CDN, and others—the operational drawbacks usually outweigh the benefits.
Events like the Cloudflare outage are rare, and when they occur, they affect a huge portion of the Internet. A multi-CDN setup can, in theory, improve availability. But the real-world cost is substantial:
- Higher architectural and operational complexity
- Difficult integration and configuration
- More points of failure
- If both CDNs are active, then double the monitoring and ongoing maintenance, and the attack surface increases.
- If one CDN is active and the other is dormant, then activating the latter is risky for security concerns and other business risk.
For most organizations, a well-engineered single-CDN deployment, complemented by regular independent DDoS testing, delivers stronger resilience and far better manageability.
A multi-CDN approach only truly makes sense for a narrow group of companies with massive global audiences, extreme traffic volumes, and strict availability requirements—typically large streaming platforms, gaming companies, and media-heavy services.