[jaimeyap]

Are the alternatives any better?

If you run a service yourself, you will have downtime, only you won't have Google's amazing SREs and wealth of experience to draw upon to resolve your outage. You will have to fix it yourself.

If you depend on some other service, you are subject to their uptime and disaster recovery capabilities. Nobody is better than Google at either of these things.

But to your point, it probably is a good idea anyways to have offline backups of your critical data, and to have out-of-band fallbacks for critical communication in the event your primary channels have an interruption.