Q: A third-party API caused my outage, so it's not really my downtime, right?

A: Your users disagree, and that's the only scorecard that counts. If your checkout fails because your payment provider is down, customers experience your site as broken. Blaming the vendor doesn't refund the lost orders or rebuild trust.

The myth is that dependency failures don't count against you. From the user's seat, your availability includes everything it takes to complete their task, including the parts you don't run.

Recommendation: monitor your critical third-party dependencies directly, and design graceful degradation, a queued retry, a fallback provider, a clear error instead of a white screen, so one vendor's outage doesn't fully stop your users.

Anticipating the follow-up: yes, track these separately so you can hold vendors accountable, but still treat them as your responsibility.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.