Your Tech Stack Is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Link

We build on layers of technology every day. The major internet services outage last Thursday reminded us how easily the dominoes can fall.

In just a few hours, a failure deep inside Google Cloud on June 12 triggered a chain reaction that knocked major parts of the internet offline. Services we use every day (like Gmail, Google Maps, Vimeo, Spotify, Discord, and many others) suddenly went dark. Behind the scenes, many agency platforms, hosting environments, and security layers faltered as one domino toppled into the next.

The failure quickly impacted Cloudflare, where much of their Workers KV system relies on Google as a backend provider. As Cloudflare struggled, more dominoes began to fall, taking down even more services that depend on its platforms.

Cloudflare’s postmortem was candid: while Google Cloud’s failure triggered the outage, Cloudflare’s reliance on that third-party storage exposed a weakness in their architecture. Ironically, they were already in the process of migrating off Google Cloud for Workers KV when the incident hit.

For agencies, the biggest takeaway from last week’s outage is not about a single vendor’s failure: it’s a sobering reminder about how intertwined our infrastructure has become. You may not run on Google Cloud, and you may not use Cloudflare directly. But many of the tools your agency relies on might be quietly dependent on providers you don’t control and may never even think about.

Incidents like this are relatively uncommon, but they expose two uncomfortable questions every agency should wrestle with:

1. Do you actually know which backbone providers your tools, platforms, and hosting partners rely on?
2. When these providers fail, does your client contract clearly state that you are not liable for outages beyond your control?

Last week’s incident is a fresh reminder that both answers need to be solid before the next domino falls.

The People Behind FAIR’s Push to Reshape WordPress

• In case you missed it, FAIR launched last week as a new initiative to create a more reliable and decentralized supply chain for WordPress (read my take in last week’s Agency News).
• The Repository has excellent coverage of the people behind FAIR which I recommend that you read. Here’s a quick list of some of the WordPressers who are involved, and it’s encouraging!
• Leadership:
  • Joost de Valk – Founder of Yoast
  • Karim Marucchi – CEO of Crowd Favorite
  • Carrie Dils – Co-chair of FAIR Technical Steering Committee (TSC), Developer and Educator
  • Mika Epstein – Co-chair of TSC, Former Plugin Review Team Lead
  • Ryan McCue – WP Security Team, Developer of WP REST API, Co-chair of (TSC)
• Contributors:
  • Pascal Birchler – Core Committer, WordPress AI Team Member
  • Marcus Burnette – Creator of The WP World
  • Scott Kingsley Clark – Core Contributor, Fields API Creator
  • Joe Dolson – Core Committer, Accessibility Team
  • Andy Fragen – Core Contributor, Developer of Plugin Rollbacks
  • Francesca Marano – Head of Partnerships at Patchstack, Core Team Co-Rep
  • Siobhan McKeown – Director of Operations at Patchstack
  • Drew Jaynes – Core Committer
  • Courtney Robertson – Open Source Developer Advocate at GoDaddy
  • Sarah Savage – Founder of AspirePress
  • Sam Sidler – Core Contributor
  • Colin Stewart – Core Committer, Maintainer of Upgrade/Install and Filesystem API
  • Brent Toderash – Project Manager at AspirePress
  • Timi Wahalahti – WordPress Community Team Program Manager

PHPVitals Puts PHP Performance Monitoring Inside WordPress (for Free!)

• PHPVitals is a new WordPress plugin that surfaces PHP performance data directly inside the WordPress admin.
• Developed by Quintin Russ, Technical Director at MyHost, PHPVitals was first introduced during his presentation at WordCamp Brisbane on June 15.
• As highlighted in MyHost’s event recap, PHPVitals aims to help WordPress professionals detect backend issues that typical frontend performance tools often miss.
• It includes a 29-point benchmark that measures the performance of various PHP operations and features and provides a letter grade at the end.
• A benchmark history is saved so you can see any performance changes over time.
• PHPVitals is available now in the WordPress plugin repository. 

Worth a Look

• Alt Ctrl Org released videos from its recent event focused on free speech and governance in Open Source and specifically in the WordPress project.
• GitHub leaked White House plans to expand AI across government with a new website and API launching July 4.
• Speed Network Online is a project from Michelle Frechette and June Liu to prompt quick, focused conversations and spark real connections, without the small talk or sales pressure.
• Apple Liquid Glass is getting a lot of attention in the design world. Here’s a YouTube tut and a CodePen that show how to create the effect on your website.
• A fake DeepSeek installer is spreading info-stealing malware that compromises victims’ passwords, crypto wallets, and sensitive data.