When Cloudflare went down this week, most people saw an irritating outage. Marketing teams, however, saw something far more serious: a view into how easily millions in ad spend can evaporate when the digital systems we rely on stop working.
For close to three hours, major sites, services, checkouts, and APIs failed. Yet campaigns across the UK continued spending as usual. With daily digital ad spend sitting around £97 million, an estimated £10–15 million of that was at risk during the outage window, not because teams made poor decisions, but because they were flying blind.
The outage wasn’t just a ‘tech problem’. It exposed how fragile marketing operations become when infrastructure fails silently in the background.
What happened this week was simple. Ads kept serving because the systems around them were never built to detect or react to infrastructure-level failure. Platforms like Google and Meta reported campaigns as ‘active’ because impressions were still technically being delivered. Dashboards continued updating normally, albeit with the usual 30–120 minute delay. Nothing within these tools signals that a website is unreachable, a CDN is down, or checkout flows have collapsed.
The financial impact wasn’t limited to wasted ad spend. Customers hit broken product pages and failed checkouts, and those abandoned sessions rarely convert once systems are back online. Many will blame retailers, not the infrastructure provider, a trust setback that can outlast the outage itself.
In a disruption this size, paid media should be paused immediately. Every click on an inaccessible site is a guaranteed loss. Teams also need simple infrastructure checks, homepage load, checkout flow, and tracking behaviour, rather than relying solely on dashboards that lag behind reality.
Fast, shared communication across marketing, tech, and support is critical. And when systems return, campaigns should restart gradually to protect both data quality and site stability.
The outage revealed a few areas where operations can be strengthened:
Better infrastructure visibility and knowing when pages, checkout flows, or tracking breaks allows faster intervention.
Faster decision-making with pre-agreed authority to pause spend removes costly delays.
Agencies and in-house teams must move at the same speed.
Have clear plans for ecosystem-wide outages and not just platform-specific ones.
These are lessons, not criticisms, and small changes here prevent losses next time.
At CEEK, we paused affected campaigns within minutes and reactivated only once systems stabilised. Going forward, every brand needs real-time monitoring, clear incident protocols, diversified channels, and regular outage simulations to test readiness.
Because outages will happen again, and the brands that handle the first ten minutes well will be the ones who avoid the next multimillion-pound blind spot.
