Even more so when most of the internet is also down.

What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down?

It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.

They could go to your competitor that's up. If you choose to be up, your competitor's customers could go to you.

If it’s that easy to get the exact same service / product as another vendor the maybe your competitive advantage isn’t so high. If Amazon would be down I’d just wait a few hours as I don’t want to sign up on another site.

I agree. These days it seems like everything is a micro-optimization to squeeze out a little extra revenue. Eventually most companies lose sight of the need to offer a compelling product that people would be willing to wait for.

Why can't we just take pride in doing a good job?

I think you’re viewing the issue from an office worker’s perspective. For us, downtime might just mean heading to the coffee machine and taking a break.

But if a restaurant loses access to its POS system (which has happened), or you’re unable to purchase a train ticket, the consequences are very real. Outages like these have tangible impacts on everyday life. That’s why there’s definitely room for competitors who can offer reliable backup strategies to keep services running.

Those are examples where they shouldn't be using public cloud in the first place. Should build those services to be local-first.

Using a different, smaller cloud provider doesn't improve reliability (likely makes it worse) if the architecture itself wrong.

It makes credit card transactions risky (offline)

Talking more about some unrelated function taking down the whole system, not advocating for "offline" credit card transactions (is this even a thing these days?). Ex: If the transaction needs to be logged somewhere, it can be built to sync whenever possible rather than blocking all transactions if the central service is down.

Payment processor being down is payment processor being down.

Do any of those competitors actually have meaningfully better uptime?

From a societal level, having everything shut down at once is an issue. But if you only have one POS system targeting only one backend URL (and that backend has to be online for the POS to work) then cloudflare seems like one of the best choices

If the uptime provided by cloudflare isn't enough then the solution isn't a cloudflare competitor, it's the ability to operate offline (which many POS have, including for card purchases) or at least multiple backends with different DNS, CDN, server location etc.

Cash exists, physical tickets exists.

those things shouldn't be fully tied to the internet/intranet anyways.

What's "a little downtime" to you might be work ruined and day wasted for someone else.

I remember a Google cloud outage years ago that happened to coincide with one of our customers' massively expensive TV ads. All the people who normally would've gone straight to their website instead got 502. Probably a 1M+ loss for them all things considered.

We got an extremely angry email about it.

It's 2025. That downtime could be be difference between my cat pics not loading fast enough, or someone's teleoperated robot surgeon glitching out.

I have a lot of bad days every year. More than I can count. It's just part of living.

Depends on the business.