Just days after Storm Claudia battered the UK, another kind of storm arrived — a digital one.
When Cloudflare went down on Tuesday, millions of users felt the impact instantly — and so did IT teams. From authentication failures to blocked VPN traffic, the outage highlighted something most organisations already know but often overlook:
Modern IT infrastructure is deeply interconnected — and so are the skills needed to support it.
We now rely on dozens (sometimes hundreds) of external services:
- CDN providers
- DNS hosts
- IAM platforms
- Cloud services
- Monitoring tools
- API gateways
When one piece breaks, everything downstream feels the pressure.
I’ve spoken to several candidates who were involved in managing or mitigating the issue — and needless to say, it was one of those days at work they’d rather not repeat, although in true resilient “all in a day’s work” style, some of them reflected positively on their contribution to resolving the issue.
What this means for hiring managers
While you can’t prevent global outages, you can prepare your teams to handle them effectively.
The Cloudflare incident reinforced the importance of hiring people who have:
- Cross-functional understanding
Engineers who understand how networks, cloud, identity, and security interact — not just their own silo.
- True troubleshooting ability
People who stay calm, diagnose quickly, and work around a dependency failure.
- Experience with monitoring & observability
Teams who can see issues early can act before they affect the wider business.
- A resilience mindset
IT professionals who design systems — and processes — with redundancy and continuity in mind.
- No single points of failure in people
One of the biggest risks during an outage is relying on a single SME who happens to be… on holiday.
The takeaway
You can’t control outages from global providers — but you can control your hiring strategy.
Building a team with the right blend of cloud, networking, DevOps, and incident response skills creates resilience that no single external failure can break.
The Cloudflare outage was a reminder: interconnected systems require interconnected skillsets.
