Patient Access
How We Ensured Business Continuity During Massive Google Outage
June 20, 2025

Last week’s 7+ hour Google outage affected over 60 critical services used by thousands of companies across the internet. Our platform kept running without interruption. Here's how.

We were prepared this time because we learned a bitter lesson back in October 2023 when a similar Google outage caught us off guard. Through our incident and postmortem process, we built a better process.

Now, when a critical service experiences outages, our system:

• Automatically falls back to secondary providers

• Gracefully degrades (callers could still navigate via keypad)

• Triggers alerts to internal staff and our customers

When our primary speech service died during this recent outage, our backup kicked in seamlessly. Hospital patients kept getting help, and our healthcare partners experienced zero downtime.

While everyone talks about building resilient systems, the truth may be simpler. Resilience comes from openly and honestly assessing your failures, and fixing them.

Every patient interaction matters. And sometimes the most valuable preparation comes from the scar tissue of previous setbacks.