What Today’s Cloudflare Outage Taught BC Businesses About Staying Resilient in 2025
If you tried loading certain websites today across British Columbia and noticed pages timing out, apps refusing to load, or strange Cloudflare error messages popping up, you weren’t imagining it. A major Cloudflare outage hit multiple regions across Canada, including Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond, Victoria, Kelowna, and Nanaimo. Sites that rely on Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, security filtering, and traffic routing were temporarily knocked offline.
For most people, it was an inconvenience. For businesses, it was something bigger.
It was a reminder that the digital infrastructure we depend on every day is more fragile than it looks.
At Happier IT, we work with a wide range of small and mid-sized businesses across BC. Whenever an outage like this happens, one question always resurfaces:
“How do we keep our business running when a provider like Cloudflare goes down?”
It’s a fair question. Cloudflare powers a massive portion of the modern internet. When they have an issue, the ripple effect can impact websites, online payments, VoIP phones, booking systems, internal tools, and cloud-based workflows.
Today’s outage proved one thing clearly:
You can’t stop outages from happening — but you can stop them from taking your business down with them.
This post breaks down what happened, why it matters for businesses in BC, and the steps you can take through Managed IT to protect your operations when global platforms fail.
Why Today’s Outage Matters for BC Businesses
Even a short disruption can cause serious problems for companies across British Columbia, especially in cities where cloud adoption is high, like Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, and Victoria.
Here are just a few of the issues we help businesses troubleshoot during outages like today:
- Websites going offline
• Online forms failing to submit
• Payment processors timing out
• Office staff unable to access cloud apps
• Productivity tools like Slack, Microsoft 365, or CRMs freezing
• VoIP phones dropping calls
• Remote workers losing access to VPN and shared drives
When your operations depend on cloud infrastructure, downtime becomes more than an IT issue. It affects revenue, customer experience, internal productivity, and overall trust in your brand.
For businesses in BC’s competitive markets — retail, construction, real estate, professional services, tech, tourism, hospitality — even 30 minutes of downtime can derail an entire workday.
The Hard Truth: Cloud Outages Are Inevitable
Whether it’s Cloudflare, Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, Shopify, or Meta — every major provider experiences disruptions. Most are resolved quickly, but they still happen.
The problem isn’t the outage itself.
The problem is being caught unprepared.
Most small businesses in BC don’t think about this until something breaks. By then, it’s too late to put safeguards in place.
This is where Managed IT becomes crucial.
A good Managed IT partner can’t prevent Cloudflare from having an issue, but they can build a resilient tech environment so your business stays functional even when global platforms run into trouble.
How BC Businesses Can Prepare for Cloud Outages
Here are the practical, realistic steps we recommend (and implement) for BC businesses through our Managed IT and Cybersecurity services. Each one directly addresses problems exposed by today’s Cloudflare outage.
1. Use Redundant DNS Providers
Most businesses use a single DNS provider because it’s simple. But when that DNS provider fails, your website goes dark instantly.
A redundant DNS setup gives your domain a backup path.
Why this matters in BC:
Today, businesses across Vancouver and Surrey saw their websites vanish — not because their servers were down, but because their DNS couldn’t route traffic.
Solution:
Implement secondary DNS through providers like AWS Route 53 or Google Cloud DNS alongside Cloudflare.
2. Build Redundancy Into Internet Connectivity
If your office or storefront relies on one internet provider, a regional outage can take out your phones, POS, admin team, and remote staff.
What BC businesses should do:
• Use two different ISPs (e.g., Telus + Shaw)
• Use automatic failover routing via your router or firewall
• Give remote teams backup connectivity options
This setup keeps your team online even if one provider goes down.
3. Move Critical Operations to Cloud Platforms Designed for High Availability
You can’t control Cloudflare, but you can control which core platforms your business depends on.
When we evaluate BC companies’ tech stacks, we often find:
• Legacy hosting
• Slow VPN setups
• Self-hosted servers with no redundancy
• Single-point-of-failure systems
Cloud outages become worse when everything depends on one location or one service.
Modernizing your infrastructure spreads out the risk.
4. Put Website Failover and Caching in Place
We help BC businesses protect their websites by implementing:
• Multi-region CDN distribution
• Static failover pages
• Automatic backups
• Staged deployments
If your main host or your CDN goes offline, your site can still serve cached content so customers are never met with a full error page.
5. Monitor Uptime and Service Status in Real Time
Most businesses only find out about outages when something breaks.
Managed IT gives you:
• Automated uptime monitoring
• Alerts the moment an outage begins
• Status tracking across all apps and platforms
• Early mitigation before customers notice
Today’s Cloudflare outage caught many businesses off-guard. Those with monitoring received alerts instantly and were able to respond within minutes.
6. Implement Business Continuity Planning (BCP) & Incident Response
A Business Continuity Plan is a blueprint for what happens when things fail.
For BC businesses, that means defining:
• Where your data lives
• How staff work if systems go down
• What backups exist
• Who takes charge during incidents
• How to communicate with customers
• How to switch tools temporarily
You shouldn’t be inventing solutions during an outage. You should already have a plan.
7. Use Managed IT to Centralize & Protect Your Tech Stack
A Managed IT provider doesn’t just fix issues — we create a stable environment where your business can run smoothly even when the world around it isn’t.
At Happier IT, we help BC organizations with:
• Cloud management
• Network configuration
• Device management
• Security tools
• Backups and recovery
• VoIP systems
• IT support and troubleshooting
• Cybersecurity monitoring
When outages hit, this foundation makes all the difference.
What Today’s Cloudflare Outage Means for BC Businesses Going Forward
Outages aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they’re becoming more frequent as global networks grow more complex.
But for BC businesses — from Vancouver to Kelowna to Victoria — outages don’t have to turn into full-day disruptions.
Today was a wake-up call, but also an opportunity.
Here’s the takeaway:
The businesses that stay online, keep serving customers, and avoid chaos are the ones who plan ahead.
If your operation relies on your website, online tools, cloud apps, or remote staff, you need resilience baked into your infrastructure — not patched in after the disaster.
Managed IT gives you that resilience.
Need to Protect Your BC Business From Outages? We Can Help.
Happier IT supports small and mid-sized businesses across British Columbia with Managed IT, Cybersecurity, and remote support tailored to how modern companies work.
If today’s Cloudflare outage caused issues for your business, or if you want to build a stronger failover and continuity plan, we’re here to help.
Let’s make your business more resilient — so the next outage becomes nothing more than a blip on the radar.
Book a call or message us anytime. Your technology should make your business stronger, not more fragile.
