What Happens If a Vendor You Rely on Goes Down? Why Your Contracts Should Cover Third-Party Outages — Before They Happen
You provide the service, but behind the scenes, you’re relying on vendors, cloud providers, security tools, AI models, and compliance platforms. What happens when one of them fails?
If your contract doesn’t shift that risk, the client may assume you are responsible.
Vendor Failures You Can’t Control
- Cloud hosting outage that knocks your platform offline.
- Backup tool fails to restore client data.
- Security vendor breach that compromises your stack.
- An AI model changes behavior or pricing midstream.
What Your Contract Should Do
- List All Third-Party Vendors in a Separate Schedule: Monjur’s Schedule of Third-Party Services creates clarity about what tools you use, who controls them, and where responsibility lies.
- Disclaim Performance and Liability: Your agreement should state that you are not responsible for vendor-side outages, failures, or data loss.
- Clarify What You Will and Won’t Do: For example, you’ll escalate issues to the vendor and help coordinate recovery, but you don’t guarantee resolution time or restitution.
- Link the Schedule to the Order: Clients should confirm approval of the vendor list during the quote or agreement process, so expectations are aligned from the start.
How Monjur Helps
- Includes a ready-to-use Schedule of Third-Party Services.
- Keeps it linked and current with Smart Hyperlinks.
- Shifts responsibility to the client when appropriate.
- Aligns with your real-world stack, AWS, OpenAI, CrowdStrike, etc.
Why It Matters
If you’re not naming your vendors in the contract, you’re taking on silent risk. And if they fail, your client’s first call is to you.
Monjur helps you set clear expectations and shift liability before an incident ever happens.