[kgermino]

Unfortunately its difficult to avoid relying on other businesses for crucial systems.

Example: Payment Processing, try building a business, especially an online one, without depending on Paypal, or at least Mastercard/Visa.

Sure you can reduce it by say not having FB Connect as the only log-on option but the simple fact is that you will almost always have to depend on other businesses, the best you can do is diversify and hope for the best.

[byoung2]

Exactly...people made this same argument a few years back when Amazon S3 went down for a few hours. Just have a few different options, and the chance that they will all be down at the same time is pretty slim.

[joey_bananas]

If you have a few options, then you don't rely on a single company, do you?

[kgermino]

Yes and No. If you have a few options than your entire business won't come grinding to a halt but if half of your customers choose to use FB Connect as their login option than they likely don't care that FB's down, or that people with email logins can still access your site. To 50% of your user-base your site has failed and so in that sense I would say that you still rely on FB for your business.