The Healthcare Compliance Step-By-Step Podcast · EPICompliance

#111 - When the Internet Breaks: What the Cloudflare Outage Taught Healthcare About Risk

·35 min·2 clips

Cloudflare’s outage was caused by one automatically generated file that was too large and crashed software.

1. The Healthcare Compliance Step-By-Step Podcast episode #111 centers on the Cloudflare outage and its impact on healthcare operations. 2. Ray Walters of EpiCompliance hosts with Jose Delgado Jr., who brings 20 plus years in healthcare consulting and runs a mental telehealth clinic. 3. The episode asks what healthcare should learn about risk, white-label vendors, and backup procedures when a major internet service fails. 4. Jose links the Cloudflare issue to an Amazon Web Services outage last month and the Change Healthcare issue last summer. 5. He says those events show that healthcare and business tech infrastructure in the 2020 plus environment is “extremely fragile” because everything bottlenecks. 6. He explains that many companies do not know what services are being white-labeled until a website, payroll processor, or app stops working. 7. Ray and Jose use Domino’s pizza apps as an example of a service unexpectedly affected by Cloudflare-backed infrastructure. 8. Jose says the office used the outage as a disaster-preparedness test and documented how the practice recovered. 9. He also mentions Square going down and says the practice still does not know why that outage happened. 10. Jose cites a Reuters article dated November 18 that says Cloudflare blamed an automatically generated configuration file that was too large and crashed the software system. 11. He compares that explanation to “every bloody pharma commercial” that lists side effects after promising benefits. 12. Jose says the bigger issue is not just the crash but that the file was meant to manage potential security threats. 13. He argues that these failures often reveal systems that have been “bandaged and duct taped” over time. 14. The episode repeatedly returns to backups, asking what a practice should do if its EHR, payroll processor, video conferencing tool, or power fails. 15. Jose says offices need to know which vendors are white-labeling video conferencing, e-prescribing, antivirus, and anti-malware tools. 16. He gives a patient-care example where a strict medication regimen could be disrupted if a mobile token or EHR-dependent prescribing service goes down. 17. Ray describes the episode as conversational and practical, with Jose answering from consulting experience and reacting quickly to new examples. 18. The tone stays direct and management-focused, with a lot of back-and-forth about accountability, transparency, and vendor lists. 19. Best fit: healthcare administrators, compliance staff, and office managers. 20. Least fit: listeners seeking a technical deep dive into network engineering.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Healthcare Compliance Step-By-Step Podcast