Why Do Outages Occur?
Network outages are inevitable and plague even the most sophisticated service providers. They are also growing increasingly common, with reported outages up 142% in 2021 alone. It’s now less a question of if you’ll experience an outage, but when. Outages, downtime, and performance issues can happen for a variety of reasons, such as:
- One of your service providers or critical endpoints - like your CDN - experiences an outage, and you don’t have a backup to reroute traffic to
- Configuration errors or deployment issues as part of your regular maintenance brings down critical infrastructure like your DNS


34% of enterprises report an hour of downtime costs them in excess of $1 million
What Can Help Prevent An Outage?
There are steps you can take to prevent future network outages that affect your website and applications. In our experience, some common causes of an outage can be mitigated by making it as easy as possible for your IT team to respond by:
Building redundancy into critical infrastructure - like your DNS
Automating failover mechanisms
Approaching updates and deployments strategically

When Major Network Outages Strike, NS1 Keeps Your Applications Online
Experiencing an Outage?
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How to Keep Your Applications Online, No Matter What's Causing the Outage
Reroute traffic in the event of CDN outages
In so many areas of computing, we work to avoid single points of failure through diverse and redundant architectures. So, why do so many companies continue to rely on a single CDN provider to deliver their most business-critical application experiences?
A multi-CDN strategy allows you to steer traffic away from unhealthy endpoints - and minimize downtime for your users. To make a multi-CDN strategy successful, organizations must have high observability of their global application delivery performance across multiple CDN providers as well as the ability to immediately take action if a CDN doesn’t perform as expected. NS1 makes this possible.
Powerful Tools to Prevent DNS Outages
Nobody is ever allowed to say it’s “just a DNS entry”, and for good reason. Today, it’s not “just DNS” - it’s the underpinning of the entire digital world. With the right DNS provider in place, you can leverage this power to circumvent outages and service issues. Look for a provider that:
Easily integrates with observability, deployment, and other tools your team is already using
Automates maintenance to avoid configuration issues
Leverages the power of intelligent traffic steering to avoid sending traffic to unhealthy endpoints, scale up or roll back regular deployments, and more

The average cost of a DDoS attack in the US is around $218,000
Redundant DNS Allows Businesses to Survive Network Disruptions
When DNS fails, or is taken down in an attack, the websites, applications and online services that depend on it effectively disappear from the internet, taking revenue and brand reputation down with it. Without a secondary or redundant DNS provider, your environment is at risk. You can mitigate this risk by building redundancies and failover mechanisms into your infrastructure to avoid outages.
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