External Dependency Visibility: Why Two-Thirds of Major Outages Start Outside Your Systems

Most major outages do not begin inside your systems.

They begin somewhere along the customer path your team does not run, such as DNS, identity providers, carriers, CDNs, cloud platforms, and third-party services. When one of those pieces slows down, customers feel it immediately, even if your internal dashboards still look normal.

That’s the external dependency blind spot. External dependency visibility is how teams spot these issues faster. In this post, you’ll learn why major outages often start outside your environment, why internal observability cannot pinpoint issues in third-party providers and network paths, and a simple way to tell if you have this visibility gap so you can troubleshoot outages faster.

‍

Who this applies to

‍

This affects many industries that deliver services through networks and third-party providers. For example, telecom networks, energy providers, utilities, healthcare systems, financial services platforms, and automotive services all rely on external infrastructure to deliver critical services. Patient portals, voice and video traffic, payment processing, remote monitoring, identity verification, and connected services depend on systems outside your operational control.

If your customers, users, or partners rely on networks or third-party providers to reach your services, this applies to you.

‍

‍

What is an external dependency?

‍

‍

How the blind spot shows up in real life

‍

You’re in an external dependency blind spot when customers are stuck, internal dashboards still look normal, and your team cannot quickly name where the problem starts. The problem is not that teams are ignoring signals. The problem is that their visibility stops at the systems they own and manage.

What’s happening behind the scenes is often one of these external issues:

• A carrier route drops packets.
  
• A DNS resolver adds delay.
  
• An identity provider slows authentication in a region.
  
• A CDN edge returns slower responses for a subset of users.
  
  

What it looks like inside your organization:
Support tickets increase. Leaders ask what’s happening and whether you are down. Engineers start troubleshooting, but they are missing the one thing they need first: a clear starting point on the customer path.

‍

‍

What the outage data shows

Recent Uptime Institute outage analysis shows that outside providers such as cloud platforms, telecom carriers, colocation, and major internet services have been responsible for about two-thirds of major publicly reported outages tracked since 2016.

The takeaway is simple. Some of the biggest outages start outside your systems, even when internal dashboards look healthy.

‍

‍

Why internal observability is not enough on its own

‍

Internal observability tools are strong at answering questions like:

• Are our services up?
• Are error rates increasing?
• Are systems scaling correctly?

But when customers report slowness or timeouts, teams need different answers:

• Where does latency start along the customer path?
• Which region, carrier, or provider is affected?
• Is this issue inside our systems or in a third-party dependency?
• Which users are impacted, and what do they have in common?

When those answers are missing, teams fill in the blanks. They restart services, roll back changes, or shift traffic to another region even when the cause sits outside their systems.

Having an outage is bad enough. Wasting additional time debating the cause makes it worse.

‍

‍

How external dependency visibility changes incident response

‍

External dependency visibility changes incident response because it lets teams point to the specific provider or segment of the customer path where the slowdown begins.

With external dependency visibility, teams can:

• confirm whether the issue starts inside their systems or in a third-party dependency
• pinpoint where performance starts degrading along the path
• identify which users, regions, or carriers are affected
• escalate to the right provider with clear evidence
• communicate clearly to leaders and customers

This does not replace internal observability. It completes it.

WanAware’s Actionable Observability helps teams connect internal signals to the external customer path, so you can see which services are affected and what changed around the same time.
‍

‍

Internal and external visibility work together

‍

Internal observability explains what’s happening inside your systems.

External dependency visibility explains what is happening along the customer path and in the providers users rely on to reach you. Together, they explain the full customer experience.

Some outages begin internally. Others begin externally. Reliability depends on understanding both.

The worst incidents are the ones where users are stuck and your team can’t tell what to fix yet.

That is where the Knowledge Discovery Engine (KDE) helps teams isolate where an issue starts, estimate likely impact, and reduce noise during triage.

‍

What to do next

‍

Not sure if this is your problem? Do a quick visibility check and share the result internally.

Write down your top 2 to 3 critical customer actions, like log in, portal access, payment, call setup, or remote access. For the most important one, list the outside systems it depends on, like identity, DNS, CDN, cloud region, carrier or ISP, and key SaaS APIs.

Then ask one question: When this action breaks, can we quickly prove whether the cause is inside our systems or in an outside provider or network path, and who owns it?

If the answer is no, you have an external dependency visibility problem. The practical goal is simple: your team should be able to stop guessing, escalate to the right owner faster, and explain impact clearly to leadership.

Want to see what this looks like during an incident? Read:Your Dashboards Are Green, But Users Can’t Use Your Service.

‍