Your AI Vendor's Outage Is Now Your Outage

Every major AI provider has had an outage. Not a rumor, not a one-off, a recurring fact of running infrastructure at that scale. And yet most teams that bolt an LLM onto their product write the integration like the API will always answer in under two seconds and never return an error. One try, one catch block that logs to the console, done.

Then the provider has a rough afternoon, and suddenly your support inbox fills up with "the app is broken" messages. Your servers are fine. Your database is fine. The one external call your core feature depends on is timing out, and from the customer's seat, that is indistinguishable from your product being down.

The dependency you didn't plan for

Teams that have been burned by a database outage or a payment processor failure usually build around it: retries, timeouts, a status page, maybe a second provider on standby. Few teams give their AI calls the same respect, even when that call sits on the critical path of the feature customers actually came for.

Part of it is that AI integrations tend to get built fast, often by whoever is most excited about the capability, and reliability is the kind of work that only feels urgent after the first real incident. Part of it is that "it worked in the demo" quietly becomes the bar for "it's done."

What good looks like

You don't need multi-provider failover on day one. You need a plan for degraded mode:

• A timeout short enough that a slow API doesn't take your whole page down with it
• A visible, honest fallback state ("still thinking" or "try again shortly") instead of a silent spinner or a raw error
• A way to tell, at a glance, whether an incident is yours or theirs, so you're not debugging your own code for an hour before checking the provider's status page

None of that is exotic engineering. It's the same discipline you'd apply to any vendor your product can't function without, just applied to the newest dependency on the list.

If your product leans on an LLM for something customers actually rely on, it's worth an honest look at what happens the next time that provider has a bad day. We build that kind of resilience into the AI features we ship at Cedrix, and we'll scope a version of your product for free if you want a second opinion on where yours would break. Check out our free MVP offer, or just get in touch and tell us what you're running on.