The real competitive edge isn’t speed, it’s resilience

The real competitive edge isn’t speed, it’s resilience Johannesburg, South Africa – 27 March 2026 - On 20 February 2026, CloudFlare went down. The outage affected dozens of popular websites and apps, including UberEats, Amazon Web Services, Wikipedia, Uber, and Microsoft 365.

Caused by a configuration error, the incident sparked widespread tech chaos, with millions of users worldwide unable to access everyday services for several hours. According to Petre Agenbag, Service Delivery Manager at Dariel, the incident served as a stark reminder that even the most widely trusted digital systems are vulnerable to unexpected failures.

Understanding The Impact Of System Failures

To showcase the potential impact of this kind of incident, let’s imagine a small business owner with an online store running on AWS. On a day when the store should be open for a busy morning of orders, the system won’t load, and customers can’t log in.

Orders can’t be processed, customer inquiries go unanswered, and automated shipping notifications fail. A planned lunchtime promotion is ruined, and scheduled payments are delayed. What began as a technical failure has now caused a tangible disruption to business operations.

“The digital world modern customers have come to depend on is only as reliable as the systems behind it,” says Petre Agenbag, Service Delivery Manager at Dariel. “If these systems fail, the impact is immediate, visible, and very difficult to contain.”

The Reality Of Always-On Digital Businesses

Today, modern organisations don’t operate offline with a digital layer added on. Digital platforms are the business. Sales, payments, logistics, customer service, reporting, these are all expected to be available. Always.

Incidents like this offer a good opportunity for business leaders to ask: what happens to my business when something goes wrong? Something as simple as a failed integration, a misconfiguration or a dependency you didn’t realise existed can have a big impact.

Preparedness Beats Heroics

Many organisations still rely on reactive models: respond quickly, escalate loudly, fix under pressure. But speed without preparation is chaos.

“Monitoring before incidents, runbooks before outages, and clarity on ownership before something breaks is a must,” he says.

With big enterprises and platforms like Cloudflare, which operate at a massive scale, an outage has a ripple effect. Customers can’t transact. Partners can’t integrate. Employees can’t work.

“It’s important to remember that when your systems fail, other businesses feel it too,” says Agenbag, which is why it’s so important to prioritise business continuity.

The difference between organisations that recover in minutes and those that struggle for days is rarely tooling alone. It’s whether failure was expected, planned for, and rehearsed.

Building True Business Resilience

Incidents like the CloudFlare outage should prompt enterprise leaders to look inward and ask: Do we understand our critical dependencies? Do we know how quickly we can recover — and what ‘recovered’ means? Are security and operations aligned, or still siloed? Would an incident today be inconvenient — or existential?

Because in an always-on world, being resilient isn’t a checkbox. It’s a capability.

“Today, businesses can’t afford to sit back and hope nothing goes wrong,” Agenbag concludes. “True business resilience is about building systems and organisations that are ready when it does.”

About Dariel

Founded in 2001 on the principle of delivering solutions right, the first time, Dariel bridges the gap between human ingenuity and technology. Our strong client partnerships reflect a commitment to excellence and our consultative approach to software engineering makes us a trusted partner for innovative and sustainable tech solutions.

Proudly independent, Dariel is part of the JSE-listed Capital Appreciation Group. https://www.dariel.co.za/

For More Information

Samantha Hogg-Brandjes | GinjaNinja | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | +27-84-458-4857