You own your availability: resilience in the age of third-party dependencies

Websites today heavily depend on third-party resources such as analytics, fonts, and ad tech to enhance user experiences, but this reliance introduces significant risks related to site speed and uptime, as revealed by a study indicating that 67% of sites request at least one render-blocking resource. Fastly highlights that although many organizations use a multi-CDN strategy for redundancy, unintentional dependencies can lead to increased vulnerabilities, as evidenced by analysis showing that numerous Fastly customers load critical content from other CDNs, risking outages. When these dependencies fail, it can result in visible errors like a 30-second white screen, as seen during a TikTok outage affecting major retailers. To mitigate these risks, websites can proxy third-party scripts through their own domain using Fastly, which offers resilience, improved performance, control over caching and compression, and enhanced privacy by preventing data leakage. This approach ensures that even during third-party outages, websites can maintain functionality and safeguard revenue, prompting a call to audit sites for render-blocking resources and consider Fastly's solutions to manage dependencies effectively.