When something like Cloudflare fails, like it did this week, we rely on what we never should have abandoned: customer support.

Since the beginning, we’ve always been focused on customers and even while technology has given us the capability to match an interpreter to a service desperately in need in healthcare, courts or police within seconds, from the beginning we’ve always been willing to do what it takes to meet the needs of our customers.

This isn’t just a nice to have.

In the UK, NHS England now explicitly recognises language as a patient-safety risk. Its 2025 Improvement framework for community language translation and interpreting services notes that around one million people in the UK are unable to speak English well or at all, and that this leads to poorer health outcomes and serious patient-safety concerns.

Research for the framework found that patients and staff “struggle with lengthy and complex processes” just to access interpreting, which delays care, and that some people with limited English are offered care at significant risk to their safety when friends, family members or free online tools are used instead of professional interpreters.

While we were celebrating 10 years of our company, during the celebration, I decided to call to one of our competitors just because I was curious about how long it might take to get a critical service. Emergencies don’t tend to take time off and neither do critical services. It took them 10 minutes to answer. Then I called our own customer service. It took them less than a minute.

Adding an additional 10 minutes to an already complex situation to find an interpreter, in some situations, could mean the difference between life and death. I’m proud of the fact that not only do we consistently respond quickly when we do have the tech behind us but, as I am proud to say I saw in our customer service team this week, we still have the same willingness to help our customers that we started off with.