Last year, the internet reminded us of an uncomfortable truth: you can have flawless infrastructure and still fail.

Cloudflare went dark. AWS stumbled. Entire platforms blinked out, not because their databases crashed or their cloud clusters collapsed, but because the most basic layer of the internet quietly fell over. DNS, the system that translates domain names into IP addresses, simply stopped responding.

For businesses, the impact was immediate and unforgiving. Websites vanished. APIs froze. Authentication broke. Email died. Customers were angry.

The servers were healthy, the cloud was up, but their domain names became unreachable, and with that, their digital identity disappeared.

This wasn’t a technical footnote. It was a structural warning.

The Hidden Single Point of Failure

Over the past decade, companies have invested heavily in resilience: multi-cloud deployments, distributed compute, load-balanced clusters, multi-CDN architectures, regionally isolated failover systems. We’ve designed infrastructure with the obsessive precision of aerospace engineering.

But the quiet truth is this: the entire system still hinges on a fragile dependency most organizations barely think about.

DNS, the directory service at the front door of every digital interaction, is often entrusted to a single provider. A decision made by default, not design.

When that provider suffers a misconfiguration, a network issue, or a provider-wide outage, everything else becomes irrelevant. Your infrastructure can be fault tolerant, globally distributed, and beautifully architected, but if your domain stops resolving, nobody can reach any of it.

We spent a decade eliminating single points of failure, and left the most obvious one untouched.

When Downtime Isn’t Just Painful, It’s Expensive

This fragility isn’t only technical. It’s deeply financial.

According to New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast, high-impact outages now carry a median cost of $2 million per hour. Put differently: every minute of downtime costs roughly $33,000. The median annual cost of major outages among surveyed organizations reached $76 million.

The math is staggering. The risk is avoidable. Yet the industry still rolls the dice.

We’ve built skyscrapers with redundant power, reinforced foundations, backup generators, and seismic protections… and then forgotten to bolt the building to the ground.

Redundancy Isn’t Insurance. It’s Infrastructure.

By distributing authoritative DNS across more than one independent provider, organizations limit the blast radius of failures and ensure their digital presence stays reachable even during upstream outages.

Today, implementing redundancy isn’t an arcane task. Modern tooling makes it straightforward to:

• Sync DNS records automatically across multiple providers
• Use diverse networks and geographies to improve resilience and latency
• Run active-active configurations to maintain uptime even during degradation
• Shift traffic seamlessly when one provider falters

And yet, many still treat DNS redundancy as a “nice to have.”

Dan Durrer, Founder & CTO of No-IP, puts it bluntly: 

“DNS is critical infrastructure, it’s the first transaction that happens when accessing resources, no matter how much redundancy and resiliency you have in your application and infrastructure, a DNS outage trumps all. Ensuring provider redundancy is key to mitigating risks with a single configuration update taking a whole DNS provider offline.”

This isn’t about fear. It’s about maturity. Redundant DNS strengthens reliability, improves performance globally, and supports regulatory flexibility across borders. It’s an easy win in a landscape where easy wins are rare.

Why We Ignore DNS And Why That’s Changing

If the industry knows all this, why does the pattern persist?

Because DNS is invisible when it works.
Because the defaults seem “good enough.”
Because leaders don’t feel the pain until it’s too late.
Because redundancy is perceived as complexity, even though modern automation has all but eliminated that barrier.

But 2025 was a wake-up call. The outages throughout the year didn’t break the internet– they exposed how easily it could break.

Every time DNS fails, the consequences cascade: revenue lost, trust eroded, engineers scrambling through the night. A “simple plumbing oversight” becomes a company-wide crisis.

Towards a More Resilient Internet

The good news is that awareness is shifting. More organizations are reassessing DNS not as a checkbox but as core infrastructure deserving the same rigor applied to compute, storage, or networking.

Resilience-minded teams are now prioritizing:

• Multi-provider DNS by default
• Automated DNS orchestration to eliminate drift
• Active-active or failover routing to maintain availability during outages
• Regular resilience testing to validate redundancy paths
• DNS observability as part of their monitoring stack

This is what reliability looks like in 2026 and beyond.

The Question for 2026

As businesses expand globally, embrace multi-cloud, and accelerate digital operations, the risk profile around DNS is only growing. Redundancy is one of the highest-leverage safeguards available: inexpensive, architecturally simple, and massively protective.

The internet was designed to be distributed. Our DNS strategies should reflect that truth.

So the question for this year isn’t: “Do we have redundant cloud clusters?”
It’s: “Does our DNS deserve the same level of respect?”

Because if it doesn’t, everything else might not matter.

About No-IP

No-IP provides reliable, easy-to-manage DNS services that help businesses stay online even during outages. With solutions like Managed DNS and Backup DNS, No-IP enables organizations to eliminate single points of failure, improve global reach, and maintain 100% uptime when it matters most. Trusted by businesses of all sizes, No-IP makes resilient DNS accessible and actionable for every infrastructure team.Learn more at: www.noip.com