The Cloudflare outage and why we still need expert marketers in an AI-driven industry

The potential of AI to transform industries and the entire world is undeniable. From automating simple daily tasks to performing high-level creative execution, AI can do in a matter of seconds what once took entire teams days or weeks to complete. 

Corporations of all sizes are adopting AI in huge numbers, in a race to take maximum advantage of the opportunities it offers to reduce costs and increase speed. 

However, a recent event highlighted some of the risk involved in businesses becoming too reliant on AI for their most important activities, such as producing regular content for marketing.  

The Cloudflare outage – what happened?

On November 18th, Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest web infrastructure and cybersecurity providers, experienced a global outage. The disruption stemmed from a glitch in a configuration file responsible for handling threat traffic, leading to a significant systems crash.

Users reported error messages such as “Internal Server Error” and “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” when services failed. 

As Cloudflare supports roughly one-fifth of global web traffic, many sites and services reliant on this infrastructure were impacted by the glitch. Websites and apps such as ChatGPT, Zoom, Canva and Discord, among many other high-traffic sites, were temporarily unusable.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the company said in a statement following the incident.

This outage underlined that relying solely on AI could be a risky strategy for businesses and, much like any technology, there are faults, errors and glitches that cannot be avoided. 

While the issue was quickly resolved, it inevitably caused difficulties for companies that depend on ChatGPT and the other sites affected. And in the fast-paced world we live in, a few hours of downtime can have serious repercussions. 

This moment pointed to a bigger issue. When everyone depends on the same system, what happens when it suddenly fails?

Several large web infrastructure firms have witnessed similar glitches that have greatly impacted businesses of all kinds and sizes. In recent weeks, Amazon Web Services experienced its own outage, causing apps, services and websites to fail. Just days later, Microsoft faced a system crash that disrupted customers worldwide.

Balancing AI with human expertise

This year has seen an explosion in the use of AI across all aspects of business operations and, despite the technology’s relative infancy, many have grown reliant on it. And while AI is a powerful tool, it is just that: a tool. Artificial intelligence may increase efficiency, but human talent brings adaptability, resilience and problem-solving abilities that machines can’t replicate when things go wrong. 

In the marketing world, AI is highly valuable when it comes to tasks like topic research and generating keyword lists, streamlining jobs that once required hours of manual investigation. These capabilities allow marketing teams to move faster and work smarter.

But the Cloudflare outage demonstrated that AI shouldn’t be relied on to fully replace skilled marketers. Tools like ChatGPT can suggest content topics, but they can’t match human intuition when it comes to picking which ones matter most to your audience at a given moment. They can pull thousands of keywords, but they can’t judge the nuanced brand impact of choosing one angle over another. They can generate content outlines, but they can’t replicate the instinct that tells an experienced marketer when something feels off, outdated or misaligned.

This is where human expertise is irreplaceable. Marketers bring creativity, emotional intelligence and contextual understanding – qualities that AI can’t replace.

The most successful marketing teams aren’t the ones that rely entirely on automation, nor the ones that avoid it. They are the ones that use AI as an intelligent assistant to enhance human workflows, rather than supplanting them. The recent outage made this balance clearer than ever. Technology can amplify good marketing, but it can’t replace the people who understand what truly connects with your audience.

If you’re interested in effectively and responsibly integrating AI into your marketing strategy, contact Axonn to discuss how it’s possible.