Multi-CDN vs. single CDN: a Mumbai streaming app buys resilience

Multi-CDN vs. single CDN: a Mumbai streaming app buys resilience
A video platform ran one premium CDN. It was excellent — until that provider had a 47-minute regional outage in South Asia, and every Mumbai viewer got a black screen at once. Churn that day spiked 6%.
They added a second CDN and a real-time steering layer that measured per-PoP latency and shifted traffic to whichever network was healthier in each region.
In India the primary was 12ms faster, so 90% of traffic stayed there; the secondary held the rest as a warm path. Next outage, failover took 8 seconds instead of 47 minutes.
Single CDN wins on cost and simpler purge logic. Multi-CDN wins when downtime directly burns revenue and you can afford dual egress.
The number that mattered: failover cut from 47 minutes to 8 seconds.