ChatGPT goes offline and serves as a call to change to design agencies that have quietly constructed half their infrastructure on one AI and a handful of invisible infrastructure providers. The simplest understanding of the concept of CDNs and a clear downtime playbook can make that weakness a fortitude asset to your team and your customers.
Table of contents:
- Introduction
- The Dependence of Design Agencies on ChatGPT
- The Real Ongoing Problem with ChatGPT
- What CDNs Are (and Why Agencies Should Care)
- A Collision of CDNs and AI in the Real World
- Commercial Risk of Not Using CDNs and Downtime
- Critical CDN Concepts Every Design Agency Must Know
- Oracle Mapping ChatGPT Outages to Your Stack
- Real-World Downtime Strategy for Design Agencies
- Emergency Communication Outage Playbook
- CDNs and AI Outages as a Value-Add Conversation
- Words to Act on the Next ChatGPT Outage
- Conclusion
The Dependence of Design Agencies on ChatGPT.
- In the past two years, design agencies like FRD Studio have connected ChatGPT to almost every step of their work. Once it has dropped even 30-60 minutes, it is felt in the whole studio.
- Briefs, user personas, UX copy, mood board prompts, proposal drafts, etc., can be AI-assisted writing first before a strategist or designer finishes them.
- Several teams rely on ChatGPT to name sprints, message explorations, or quickly write UX copy texts in a live client workshop, and therefore, an outage can ruin meetings and make it look unprofessional.
- It is relied upon by developers and product designers for code snippets, regular expressions, microcopy, and even accessibility scans, meaning that downtime not only slows down the thinking work but also the implementation work.
The less visible this reliance, the less one can afford to have some unforeseen interruption, and can become the most trusted design agency in Gurugram.
The Real Ongoing Problem with ChatGPT.
An outage appears externally as the apparent failure of AI, but inside the hood, it tends to be a combination of demand spikes, infrastructure problems, and upstream provider problems.
- Capacity can be overwhelmed by sudden bursts in traffic, introducing a new feature, updating the background model, etc., resulting in errors, high latency, or hard downtime.
- Centralized architectures imply that a failure in one cluster, load balancer, or component of a data center can affect other regions and products and bring the web UI and APIs down simultaneously.
- In some cases, the problem does not lie with the AI platform but with a third party that is of critical importance, like a cloud provider, DNS service, or content delivery network (CDN) that is fronted by a large number of apps all at once.
The importance of these layers is that design agencies are now creating services on such a stack as opposed to just visiting a site, and can boost the web and development agency in Gurugram.
What the CDNs Are (and why agencies should care).
A distributed network of servers that will be placed between your origin server and users to provide them with faster and more reliable content is called a content delivery network (CDN).
- In place of all visitors connecting to your main server, a CDN stores the static content (images, CSS, JS, fonts, videos) on peripheral servers in locations all over the globe and thus shortens the latency and load on your origin.
- In current CDNs, caching is just a fraction of the tasks: they also end TLS, offer WAF and DDoS services, do routing and load balancing, inject security headers, and even execute edge functions.
In the case of design agencies, CDNs can no longer be considered DevOps items. They directly influence:
- The page-load time and the Core Web Vitals (CSR and UX), and SEO.
- International access to design systems, prototypes, and client sites.
- The radius of blast in case of interruption of any provider, such as Cloudflare or Fastly: a single failure may bring down dozens of your customers simultaneously.
A Collision of CDNs and AI in the Real World: What Outages Look Like.
The infrastructure angle, rather than an AI model angle, has been present in many high-profile AI outages in the past year.
- An issue in one of the larger CDN or cloud networking layers can affect access to AI tools (such as ChatGPT), design tools, analytics dashboards, and the marketing sites of your clients at the same time.
- In such an event, users can experience timeouts, or an error with the SSL, or an error that is a simple “service unavailable” message on various unrelated services that just happen to be on the same CDN.
In the case of a design agency, it is possible that three things will fail simultaneously:
- Your internal toolset (ChatGPT, other A.I. copilots, and design platforms).
- Your personal website and portfolio.
- A variety of live client properties under your management.
In the absence of the minimally conceptualized idea of CDNs, one cannot easily explain to clients why everything is dead or make superior architectural choices that mitigate this form of coupling, and it will affect the performance marketing agency in Gurugram.
Commercial risk of not using CDNs and downtime.
The AI tools and CDNs are going to silently develop into black boxes when they are treated as such.
- Delivery risk: A copy-heavy launch, campaign, or redesign sprint can get stuck as your team’s AI assistant goes out of service, and your team has nothing to do.
- Client trust risk: Clients want the agencies to own the web stuff. Outages should be explained and repeated without being explained.
- Revenue and cost risk: The interruption of revenue and cost amid billed sprints will cause a late arrival of deadlines, overtime scramble, and inconvenient scope and hours discussions.
Not just due to the size of your agency, but even at the small scale, the aggregate effects of a few annual outages will soon exceed the expense of the bare minimum of resilience planning.
Critical CDN Concepts Every Design Agency Must Know.
Designers and PMs are not required to be turned into SREs, but they must be conversant with several fundamental concepts.
- Single-CDN and Multi-CDN: A single-CDN is easier to use but exacerbates the blast radius; a multi-CDN design will be able to circumvent provider-specific outages at the price of additional complexity.
- Edge caching and cache invalidation: Being aware of what is in the cache, how long it has been there, and how it can be removed is important when making launches or hotfixes, particularly when customers are complaining that the new design is not yet live.
- Origin failover: Select CDNs can notice that your principal origin is going dead and direct traffic to a secondary one to minimize the downtime of content that cannot be taken down.
By having your agency be able to converse intelligently on these topics, you will get:
- Increased cooperation with the IT departments of its clients.
- Better seat at the table with regard to performance and uptime-related architecture decisions.
The fact that the resilience work can be scoped as a paid service rather than a free thought.
Oracle Mapping ChatGPT Outages to Your Stack.
When ChatGPT goes offline, a good fire drill is to diagram the areas where you have the same weakness in your own processes.
- Name all the internal practices that presuppose the availability of AI: ideating, UX copywriting, dev support, quality assurance checklists, proposal generation, meeting organization, and reporting.
- Determine the number of your own internal and front-end systems that rely on a single provider of infrastructure (one AI vendor, one CDN, one hosting system, and one auth vendor).
Patterns to look for:
- Procedures that cannot be found anywhere in the form of a manual.
- Products delivered to clients with presupposed AI-accelerated schedules.
- The websites and applications rely on a common CDN, a common region, and a common cloud.
- The first step is recognition, and the second step is deliberate diversification.
Real-world downtime strategy for design agencies.
A downtime plan does not have to be hefty. An incident playbook, written in simple terms, can drastically help decrease the disorder.
- Establish dependencies. Classification: Classify tools and services into Tier 1 (critical), Tier 2 (important), and Tier 3 (nice-to-have). The major Tier 1 CDN will be ChatGPT and you.
- Manual fallbacks: Have an alternative to Tier-1 AI workflows: Have a non-AI backup to each Tier-1 AI workflow: pre-built copy structures, template libraries, checklists, and internal guidance, which designers may make use of in case of AI unavailability.
- Pre-identify AI and infra options: Understand which other secondary AI tools, hosting, or CDNs your team is willing to change to and under what terms.
Combine this with a relatively lightweight internal incident protocol:
- Who verifies external status pages and makes sure that there is a problem?
- Who is the one updating the team Slack/Teams channel?
- Who is the owner of client communication in case of an influence on a client asset?
- A runbook with one page makes panic, and finger-pointing is minimized in case of system failure.
Emergency Communication Outage Playbook.
Clients also base their judgment on the way agencies communicate when things are sailing smoothly and not when they are going through a rough sail.
- Keep it honest and non-technical: Just say it in simple words, which is that there is a huge infrastructure provider that stands in front of several locations undergoing a hitch, rather than conceal it with a multitude of glitches.
- Focus on impact and mitigation: Expectation of state, state which state is affected, state which state is not affected, state what you are actively doing: monitoring, switching paths, applying manual workaround.
Templates to keep ready:
- A brief email/Slack message in the case of AI delays: a description of the fact that one of your upstream AI providers is unavailable, the impact that this has on a deliverable, and what you are doing as an alternative.
- Status update in case of CDN/hosting incidents: the extent of the impact, the time of the next update, and any interim modifications (i.e., turning off heavy media, turning off features).
- Ready communication saves your face even in cases where you are not in full control of the underlying outage.
The CDNs and AI Outages Are Value-Add Conversations.
Done properly, outages do provide resilience and strategy work as an upsell opportunity to design agencies.
- Introduce resilience checks on client sites: checking CDN setup, failover, cache policy, and monitoring, and transforming them into a small paid project.
- Propose an “AI dependency audit service” to internal digital teams: mapping of AI position within their processes and recommendations, and writing a backup strategy.
The following discussions put your agency back to the value of a strategic collaborator and not merely a screens and pixels supplier:
- You assist clients in knowing how risky it is to them to use third-party AI tools and CDNs in the first place.
- You may suggest graded investments in redundancy that they can reasonably afford and have a risk profile.
- This creates a level of relationship elevation and may be the gateway to long-term retainers.
Words to act on for the next ChatGPT outage.
Instead of considering the next outage as the mere irritation of the next order, make it an extension of the stress test and post-mortem.
- Write down clearly what was broken in your process: what teams got stranded, what deadlines were jeopardized, which meetings were impacted, and how people did things differently.
- Turn those observations into actions—new templates, updated SOPs, better tech stack diagrams, and updated service offerings around uptime, performance, and AI strategy.
- Book a short internal “resilience retrospective” in 48 hours: record some learning as it will be fresher, and allocate one or two minor improvements that can be realized in the following sprint.
As time passes, every incident is less devastating and more of a normal weather occurrence that your agency is familiar with.
Conclusion:
Design agencies can never stop AI platforms or CDNs from failing, and they can also decide their level of exposure and professional response. Having an approximate understanding of the CDNs, a healthy understanding of how ChatGPT can fit into your processes, and a workable downtime policy in place, outages become not existential threats but operational hiccups that need to be handled accordingly, which is the thinking that is more and more what a client is paying agencies to do.
