What Happens If a Vendor You Rely on Goes Down?

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

  1. 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.
  2. Disclaim Performance and Liability: Your agreement should state that you are not responsible for vendor-side outages, failures, or data loss.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

This article is general information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship with Scott & Scott, LLP. Outcomes depend on each client's facts; prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

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Rob Scott
About the author

Rob Scott

CEO & Co-Founder, Attorney

Attorney with 25+ years of MSP legal experience. Co-Founder of Scott & Scott, LLP and Monjur. Has overseen contracting for 1,000+ MSPs.

Rob Scott is an attorney with more than 25 years of experience in MSP and technology law, and the co-founder of both Scott & Scott, LLP and Monjur. He has overseen customer contracting for more than 1,000 managed service providers and built Monjur to bring attorney-supervised contract intelligence to the MSP industry.

Licensed in Texas since 1999, Rob earned his J.D. from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and his B.A. in Economics and Philosophy from Austin College. His practice focuses on software licensing, software audit defense, data privacy, and vendor risk, representing MSPs and enterprise clients in transactions and disputes with major software publishers.

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