When Cloudflare experienced downtime this week, many services across the internet were impacted. For organizations that rely heavily on Cloudflare’s global CDN footprint, it was a disruptive event. For customers of IBM NS1 Connect, the experience was meaningfully different. This wasn’t luck – it was architecture.
Although Cloudflare, is one of the CDN providers we use, NS1 Connect is engineered with multiple CDN providers (yes, we walk our own talk!), to ensure resilience in exactly these kinds of situations. Our traffic strategy is intentionally diversified so that if one provider experiences issues, others can continue to serve traffic greatly reducing the impact of an outage.
How We Detected and Responded
Our continuity during the outage was driven by a combination of automation, robust monitoring and well-designed DNS routing working together to minimize disruption:
The Power of NS1 Connect Filter Chains
Filter Chain technology is at the heart of this resiliency story. Filter Chains enable automated and manual decision-making at the DNS layer to route traffic only to healthy endpoints – in this case, the CDN provider that was still functioning normally. As DNS routed traffic to the healthy provider, customers experienced minimal disruption, without needing to know which CDN was being used at any given moment.
Filter Chain failovers can be fully automated when monitoring detects that a critical service is down. However, when a provider is flapping – rapidly switching between healthy and unhealthy states – Filter Chains can be manually locked to the failover site. This avoids unnecessary oscillation and provides a more stable, predictable user experience.
This outage is exactly the type of situation that NS1 Connect Filter Chains were built for – automated resiliency that keeps services available even when major internet infrastructure providers encounter problems.
While outages do happen and are never pleasant, this incident showcased the strength of NS1 Connect’s resilient architecture and the expertise of our networking teams. It is an excellent example of how multi-provider strategies and intelligent DNS can keep critical applications online – even when unexpected failures occur.
If your team is exploring ways to reduce reliance on single providers and harden your application reliability, this is the kind of architecture worth considering. With NS1 Connect Filter Chains and multi-CDN failover, organizations can better mitigate outages and improve overall service continuity.
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