Disaster Recovery for Small Apps: Playbook After a Cloud or CDN Outage

When Cloudflare or AWS goes dark: a compact runbook for small teams

Outages are inevitable — but chaos is optional. In January 2026 we again saw broad outage reports tied to major edge and cloud providers. For small teams that ship web apps, outages at Cloudflare or AWS can mean minutes of lost conversions, hours of frantic firefighting, and days of blame-game postmortems. This playbook gives a compact, actionable runbook you can follow during the first three hours of an outage, plus communication templates, a postmortem template, and pragmatic long-term mitigations that fit small teams' budgets.

Quick triage (first 0–15 minutes)

Start with facts, not assumptions. Your first priority is determining scope and impact so your team acts efficiently.

Checklist

• Check provider status pages: Cloudflare Status, AWS Health Dashboard, and your CDN or secondary providers.
• Confirm broader reports: DownDetector, Twitter/X, and vendor Twitter feeds can confirm a systemic outage (quick context only).
• Run simple probes from multiple networks and locations (office, mobile 5G, home): curl -I https://example.com, dig +short example.com, traceroute/TCP traceroute.
• Open your incident channel (Slack, MS Teams) and declare an incident with severity.

Quick commands to run

# Check HTTP response from two places
curl -I https://example.com
# Check DNS resolution and where it's pointing
dig +short example.com @8.8.8.8
# Test origin direct against known IP (see runbook for origin IP)
curl -H "Host: example.com" http://203.0.113.10/

Immediate actions (15–60 minutes): contain and restore service

The goal in the first hour is to restore customer-facing functionality with minimal change and risk.

If the outage is Cloudflare/edge/CDN-related

• Pause or bypass the CDN: If you're using Cloudflare, use “Pause Cloudflare on Site” from the dashboard or change the zone to bypass mode. This moves traffic direct to origin (only if origin can handle traffic and is publicly reachable).
• Switch DNS to origin IP: If your DNS provider supports it, temporarily point the A/AAAA record to your origin and set a low TTL (60s). Remember DNS TTL propagation; pre-planned low TTLs reduce lag.
• Use host override for critical endpoints: For quick verification or to provide manual instructions to support, give staff a hosts-file entry and curl examples. Example:

# /etc/hosts or Windows equivalent
203.0.113.10 example.com
# Test origin direct
curl -H "Host: example.com" http://203.0.113.10/

If the outage is AWS or region-level

• Check AWS Health / Personal Health Dashboard for impacted services (EC2, ALB, RDS, S3).
• Fail over to a secondary region if you have a warm standby. Use Route 53 weighted or failover records pointing to the secondary region. If you don't have a warm standby, switch to a static error page hosted on a secondary CDN or S3 bucket so users see a helpful message instead of a 5xx.
• Isolate dependent services: If a managed service like RDS is impacted, scale down frontend capacity and enable read-only mode if possible to protect data integrity.

Rapid fixes that often work

• Serve a cached static shell: S3 + CloudFront or a secondary CDN can serve a temporary static marketing/maintenance page.
• Enable failover DNS records precreated for emergencies.
• Temporarily disable non-critical integrations that add latency or failure points (third-party auth, analytics, etc.).

Communication playbook

Clear, timely communication prevents frustration and reduces support volume. Follow a predictable cadence.

Internal incident message (first 5 minutes)

[INCIDENT] Severity: P1 — Cloudflare CDN errors, 2026-01-16 08:15 UTC
Status: Investigating
Impact: Public site returns 502/timeout for most users
Next update: in 15 minutes
Owner: @on-call

External status update (first public message within 15 minutes)

We are aware of an outage affecting https://example.com. We are investigating and will post updates every 30 minutes. No action needed from customers at this time. — status.example.com

Ongoing cadence

• Time-box updates: every 15–30 minutes early on, then hourly.
• Use the same channel: status page, Twitter/X, and a pinned Slack message for customers in private support channels.
• Be transparent: say what you know, what you're doing, and when you will next update.

Customers value honest, frequent updates more than instant fixes. Silence fuels speculation.

Post-incident: the postmortem template (deliver within 48–72 hours)

Write a blameless postmortem focused on facts and actionable follow-ups. Use this template and publish it internally and to affected customers if impact was large.

Postmortem template

1. Title & severity — e.g., "2026-01-16 Cloudflare CDN outage — P1"
2. Summary — 2–3 sentence plain-language impact overview.
3. Timeline — annotated timeline with timestamps and actions taken (UTC), from detection to full recovery.
4. Root cause — technical root cause as reported by provider or determined by team.
5. Detection & response — how we detected the issue, what worked, what failed.
6. Customer impact — metrics: % of requests failing, duration, pages impacted, revenue/SLAs affected.
7. Action items — concrete remediation with owners and deadlines (short-term, medium-term, long-term).
8. Lessons learned — process or tooling changes to prevent recurrence or reduce impact.

Example action items

• Create a hot DNS failover runbook — owner: @ops, due: 1 week
• Deploy a static fallback page on secondary CDN — owner: @dev, due: 48 hours
• Run quarterly DR drills that simulate CDN and region failures — owner: @englead, due: schedule by end of Q1

Short-term observability & detection improvements

You don't need full-blown enterprise tooling to improve detection. Add these within days.

• Public synthetic checks from 3+ geographic locations (use free tiers of Uptrends, Checkly, or simple GitHub Actions).
• RUM (Real User Monitoring) to capture client-side failures and geographic spread.
• DNS health checks and Route 53/third-party health-check endpoints preconfigured for failover.
• External BGP and DNS monitors (e.g., ThousandEyes, BGPStream) for large customers; for small teams, use public BGP/Routing alert feeds.
• Log retention for 7–30 days across app and CDN logs to speed root-cause analysis.

Long-term mitigations (3–12 months)

Mitigations should reduce blast radius and recovery time objective (RTO) without bankrupting small teams.

1) Multi-CDN and multi-DNS strategy

Use a secondary CDN on standby (CloudFront, Fastly, BunnyCDN, etc.). Keep origin and assets mirrored. Pre-create DNS records and health checks for rapid failover. For small teams, pay-per-use CDNs like Bunny or stackable CloudFront can be cost-effective.

2) Warm standby for critical services

• Maintain a warm replica of web servers in a secondary region (AMI/containers ready to deploy via CI).
• Replicate object storage (S3 Cross-Region Replication) and database snapshots/replicas.

3) Infrastructure as Code + runbook automation

Keep failover steps codified in Terraform/CloudFormation and test them in CI. A single scripted command to switch DNS weights or deploy the fallback static site saves precious minutes.

4) Chaos engineering and DR drills

Run tabletop exercises and controlled chaos experiments (disable CDN in staging) to validate the runbook. In 2026, chaos tooling and lightweight chaos-as-a-service are mainstream and relevant even to small teams.

5) Edge-first design and progressive degraded UX

Design your app so the critical user flows can operate in degraded mode. Serve cached pages, let customers read content even if write actions are queued, and use client-side retry strategies where appropriate. These are core ideas in an edge-first developer approach.

2026 trends to leverage

• Programmable CDNs: Use edge compute (Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, etc.) to host fallback logic closer to users.
• AI-powered observability: Modern AIOps tools can correlate signals from CDN, DNS, and cloud provider feeds to surface likely root causes faster.
• Zero-trust networking and private origins: Reduce risk by proxying origins and keeping them non-public; make sure your failover options account for private-origin setups.
• eBPF-enhanced observability: For small teams using managed offerings, look for providers that expose advanced network telemetry to help with post-incident analysis. See edge auditability write-ups for operational guidance.

Cost vs complexity: pragmatic recommendations for small teams

Not every team needs multi-cloud. Prioritize:

1. Low-cost static fallback on a separate provider (S3 + CloudFront or S3 + BunnyCDN).
2. DNS failover with pre-warmed records & low TTLs.
3. Automated scripts to repoint DNS and start backups — keep them in your repo.
4. Quarterly DR exercises and a single printed runbook (or pinned Slack message).

Printable compact runbook (for quick reference)

Paste this into a Slack pinned message or paper copy.

1. Declare incident channel & severity. Owner: @on-call.
2. Confirm provider status & scope (Cloudflare / AWS status pages).
3. Run probes: curl -I, dig, attempt origin direct via hosts file.
4. If CDN suspected: Pause CDN / switch DNS to origin IP (low TTL) or enable static fallback on secondary CDN.
5. If AWS region suspected: Enable Route 53 failover to secondary region / static fallback.
6. Post first public update (status page/Twitter/X) within 15 minutes. Cadence: 15–30 mins.
7. Perform root-cause analysis; write postmortem within 72 hours. Create action items.

Example Terraform snippet: Route 53 failover record (simplified)

# Simplified example — keep a real-backed terraform module in your repo
resource "aws_route53_record" "primary" {
  zone_id = var.zone_id
  name    = "example.com"
  type    = "A"
  ttl     = 60
  set_identifier = "primary"
  weight = 100
  records = [var.primary_ip]
}

resource "aws_route53_record" "secondary" {
  zone_id = var.zone_id
  name    = "example.com"
  type    = "A"
  ttl     = 60
  set_identifier = "secondary"
  weight = 0
  records = [var.secondary_ip]
}

When to call for external help

• If outage impacts data integrity (databases failing), escalate immediately to provider support and consider restoring from last-known-good backup.
• If the outage looks like a routing or BGP issue, engage your DNS provider and consider announcing a temporary secondary A record via an alternate DNS provider.
• Use paid support lines for enterprise-level providers when SLAs require it — have escalation contacts documented in advance.

Final checklist before you close the incident

• Confirm all customer-facing systems are healthy and stable for 30+ minutes.
• Reinstate normal routing and CDN settings if you performed temporary bypasses.
• Document all steps taken in the incident channel and in the postmortem draft.
• Schedule any required follow-up work and assign owners with deadlines.

Closing thoughts: resilience is a muscle, not a product

Major provider outages (Cloudflare, AWS, or any other critical supplier) are not a question of "if" but "when." Small teams can survive and move faster than bigger organizations by having a compact, practiced playbook, low-friction failover options, and clear communication patterns. Use this runbook to reduce downtime, restore user trust, and evolve your architecture incrementally.

Actionable takeaways:

• Prepare a low-TTL DNS failover and a static fallback on a secondary CDN today.
• Script one command to switch DNS weights or pause your CDN; put it in CI.
• Run a quarterly DR drill and write a blameless postmortem within 72 hours after any outage.

Need a ready-to-use runbook template or a short workshop to bake these steps into your workflow? Download the editable runbook and incident templates from our resource pack or book a 30-minute consultancy call to turn this playbook into code and CI scripts tailored to your stack.

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