DigitalOcean Holdings (DOCN) Risk Factors

It is difficult to predict customer adoption rates and demand for our products and services, the entry of competitive products or services or the future growth rate and size of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) markets. The expansion of these markets depends on a number of factors, including the cost, performance, and perceived value associated with cloud computing platforms as an alternative to more established and legacy systems, the ability of cloud computing platform providers to address heightened data security and privacy concerns, and the cost and effort associated with converting or transition from current systems to cloud-based systems. If we or other cloud computing platform providers experience security incidents, loss of customer data, disruptions or other similar problems, the market for these applications as a whole, including our platform and products, may be negatively affected. If there is a reduction in demand caused by a lack of customer acceptance, technological challenges, weakening economic conditions, data security or privacy concerns, governmental regulation, competing technologies and products, or decreases in information technology spending or otherwise, either now or in the future, the market for our platform and products might not continue to develop or might develop more slowly than we expect, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, new technological developments, including the development and use of generative artificial intelligence, are rapidly evolving and we are not certain as to the success of our AI/ML products (such as the provision of AI/ML infrastructure and platform services in connection with our recent acquisition of Paperspace) and the complexities associated with the current or future regulatory requirements as well as social and ethical considerations relating to the AI/ML market. Our core customer base consists of startups and growing digital businesses. As these individuals and organizations grow, if we are unable to meet their evolving needs, we may not be able to retain them as customers. Our business will also suffer if the market for our solutions proves less lucrative than projected or if we fail to effectively acquire and service such users. We expect that our path to growth will, in part, rely on scaling our platform to meet the needs of our customers as they increase usage of our platform. Accordingly, if such customers fail to grow as expected, then our path to growth may be adversely affected. In addition, our inability to offer both suitable services to support their businesses at scale and suitable and appropriately priced services for the initial state of their business, could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. We believe that the markets for startups and growing digital businesses are underserved, and we intend to continue to devote substantial resources to such markets. However, these customers and potential customers frequently have limited budgets and may choose to allocate resources to items other than our solutions, especially in times of economic uncertainty or recessions. If these markets fail to be as lucrative as we project or we are unable to market and sell our services to such customers effectively, our ability to grow our revenues quickly and achieve or maintain profitability will be harmed.

Our success depends to a significant degree on our ability to obtain, maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights. We rely on a combination of trademarks, service marks, trade secrets, patents, copyrights, contractual restrictions, and confidentiality procedures to establish and protect our intellectual and proprietary rights, including in our technology, know-how, and brand. Legal standards relating to intellectual property rights are uncertain, in both the United States and other jurisdictions in which we operate, and protecting, monitoring, and defending our intellectual property rights might entail significant expense. Intellectual property rights that we have or may obtain may be challenged, circumvented, invalidated or held unenforceable. Furthermore, even though we attempt to enter into contractual provisions with third parties to control access to, or the distribution, use, misuse, misappropriation, reverse engineering or disclosure of, our intellectual property or technology, no assurance can be given that these agreements will be sufficient or effective in protecting our intellectual property rights. Moreover, intellectual property laws, standards, and enforcement mechanisms in foreign countries may be uncertain, may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States, or may not be available to us. As we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our products, services, and other intellectual property, such as our trademarks, will likely increase. As we further expand internationally, we may be unable to register, obtain the right to use, or stop others from using, our brand names in certain jurisdictions. Despite our efforts, we may be unable to adequately obtain, maintain, protect, and enforce our intellectual property rights or prevent third parties from infringing upon, misappropriating or otherwise violating our intellectual property rights. If we fail to protect our intellectual property rights adequately, our competitors may gain access to, or be able to replicate, our proprietary technology, products, or services, or may use brands similar to our own valuable brands, and our business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects may be harmed. Our attempt to enforce our intellectual property rights, even if successful, could result in costly litigation or diversion of our management's attention and resources, and, as a result, delay sales or the implementation or introduction of our products and platform capabilities, or injure our reputation.

It may become increasingly difficult to maintain and improve our platform performance, especially during peak usage times and as our customer base grows and our platform becomes more complex. If our platform is unavailable or if our customers are unable to access our platform within a reasonable amount of time or at all, we may experience a loss of customers, lost or delayed market acceptance of our platform, delays in payment to us by customers, injury to our reputation and brand, legal claims against us, significant cost of remedying these problems and the diversion of our resources. In addition, to the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our business, financial condition and results of operations, as well as our reputation, may be adversely affected. Further, the software technology underlying our platform is inherently complex and may contain material defects or errors, particularly when new products are first introduced or when new features or capabilities are released. We have from time to time found defects or errors in our platform, and new defects or errors in our existing platform or new products may be detected in the future by us or our users. We cannot assure you that our existing platform and new products will not contain defects. Any real or perceived errors, failures, vulnerabilities, or bugs in our platform could result in negative publicity or lead to data security, access, retention or other performance issues, all of which could harm our business. The costs incurred in correcting such defects or errors may be substantial and could harm our business. Moreover, the harm to our reputation and legal liability related to such defects or errors may be substantial and could similarly harm our business.

The reliability and continuous availability of the software, hardware and workflow processes underlying our internal systems, networks and infrastructure and the ability to deliver our products are critical to our business. Any interruptions resulting in our inability to timely deliver our products, or materially impacting the efficiency or cost with which we provide our products, would harm our brand, profitability and ability to conduct business. If third-party vendors increase their prices and we are unable to successfully pass those costs on to our customers, it could have a substantial effect on our results of operations.

Because our customers choose to integrate our products with certain capabilities provided by third-party providers, the functionality and popularity of our platform depends, in part, on our ability to integrate our platform and applications with developer tools and other third-party applications. These third parties may change the features of their technologies, restrict our access to their applications, or alter the terms governing use of their applications in a manner that is adverse to our business. Such changes could functionally limit or prevent our ability to use these third-party technologies in conjunction with our platform, which would negatively affect adoption of our platform and harm our business. If we fail to integrate our platform with third-party applications that our customers use, we may not be able to offer the functionality that our customers need, which would harm our business.

The costs of building out, leasing and maintaining our data centers constitute a significant portion of our capital and operating expenses. To manage our capacity while minimizing unnecessary excess capacity costs, we continuously evaluate our short and long-term data center capacity requirements in order to effectively manage our capital expenditures. We may be unable to project accurately the rate or timing of increases in volume of usage on our platform or to successfully allocate resources to address such increases, and may underestimate the data center capacity needed to address such increases, and in response, we may be unable to increase our data capacity, and increase our capital expenditures on servers and other equipment, in an expedient and cost-effective manner to address such increases. If we underestimate our data center capacity requirements and capital expenditure requirements, we may not be able to provide our platform and products to current customers or service the expanding needs of our existing customers and may be required to limit new customer acquisition or enter into leases or other agreements for data centers, servers and other equipment that are not optimal, all of which may materially and adversely impair our results of operations. In addition, many of our data center sites are subject to multi-year leases. If our capacity needs are reduced, or if we decide to close a data center, we may nonetheless be committed to perform our obligations under the applicable leases including, among other things, paying the base rent for the balance of the lease term and continuing to pay for any servers or other equipment. If we overestimate our data center capacity requirements and capital expenditures, and therefore secure excess data center capacity and servers or other equipment, our operating margins could be materially reduced. Finally, the costs of operating our data centers have increased and may increase in the future due to rising energy prices as a result of global geopolitical issues.

We use open source software in connection with developing, operating, and offering our products, services, and technology, and we expect to continue to incorporate open source software in our products, services, and technology in the future. Some open source projects have known vulnerabilities and architectural instabilities and are provided on an "as-is" basis which, if not properly addressed, could negatively affect the performance of our product. Few of the licenses applicable to open source software have been interpreted by courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a manner that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our products. For example, some open source licenses may, depending on the nature of our use and the terms of the applicable license, include terms requiring us to offer certain of our solutions for no cost, make our source code available, or license our modifications or derivative works under the terms of applicable open source licenses. From time to time, there have also been claims challenging the ownership rights in open source software against companies that incorporate it into their products, and the licensors of such open source software provide no warranties or indemnities with respect to such claims. Our use of open source software, and participation in open source projects, may also limit our ability to assert certain of our intellectual property and proprietary rights against third parties, including competitors, who access or use software or technology that we have contributed to such open source projects. Moreover, we cannot ensure that we have incorporated open source software in our products, services, and technology in a manner that is consistent with the terms of the applicable license or our current policies and procedures. If an author or other third party that distributes such open source software were to allege that we had not complied with the conditions of one or more of these licenses or such third party changes the type of open source license applicable to such software without our knowledge, we or our customers could be subject to lawsuits, and we could incur significant legal expenses defending against such allegations, be subject to significant damages resulting from the suits, enjoined from the sale of our products that contained the open source software, and required to comply with onerous conditions or restrictions on these products, which could disrupt the distribution and sale of these products. Such litigation could be costly for us to defend, have a negative effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations, or require us to devote additional research and development resources to change or reengineer our products or take other remedial actions.

Our business activities are subject to various restrictions under United States export and similar laws and regulations, including the United States Department of Commerce's Export Administration Regulations and various economic and trade sanctions regulations administered by the United States Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Controls. The United States export control laws and United States economic sanctions laws include restrictions or prohibitions on the sale or supply of certain products and services to United States embargoed or sanctioned countries, governments, persons and entities. In addition, various countries regulate the import of certain technology and have enacted or could enact laws that could limit our ability to provide our customers access to our platform or could limit our customers' ability to access or use our platform in those countries. We incorporate encryption technology into certain of our products. U.S. export control laws require authorization for the export of encryption items. In addition, various countries regulate the import of certain encryption technology, including through import permitting and licensing requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our products and services or could limit our customers' ability to implement our products and services in those countries. Obtaining the necessary authorizations, including any required license, for a particular transaction may be time-consuming, is not guaranteed, and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. Laws and restrictions continue to evolve in connection with geopolitical tensions and the introduction and increasing adoption of new technologies. Most recently, new export controls have included strict licensing restrictions on exports of U.S. regulated semiconductor- and supercomputer-related products and technologies as well as certain chips and chip-related products and technologies to China. Although we take precautions to prevent our platform from being provided in violation of such laws, our platform may have in the past, and could in the future be, provided inadvertently in violation of such laws, despite the precautions we take. If we fail to comply with these laws and regulations, we and certain of our employees could be subject to civil or criminal penalties, including the possible loss of export privileges and fines. We may also be adversely affected through penalties, reputational harm, loss of access to certain markets, or otherwise. Changes in our platform, or future changes in export and import regulations may prevent our users with international operations from utilizing our platform globally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our platform to certain countries, governments, or persons altogether. Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions, or related legislation, or change in the countries, governments, persons, or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our platform by, or in our decreased ability to export or sell subscriptions to our platform to, existing or potential users with international operations. Any decreased use of our platform or limitation on our ability to export or sell our platform would likely adversely affect our business, results of operations, and financial results.

As of December 31, 2023, we had net operating losses (NOL) carryforwards for federal, state and foreign income tax purposes and other tax credit carryforwards for federal and state tax purposes. Certain of these NOL carryforwards and tax credit carryforwards will expire in various years beginning in 2038 for federal purposes and 2025 for state purposes if not utilized. Our ability to utilize our NOL carryforwards and other tax credit carryforwards to offset taxable income may be subject to certain limitations. Under Sections 382 and 383 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the Code), a corporation that undergoes an "ownership change" (as defined under Section 382 of the Code and applicable Treasury Regulations) is subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its pre-change NOLs or other tax credits to offset future taxable income. We may experience a future ownership change under Section 382 of the Code that could affect our ability to utilize the NOLs to offset our income. Furthermore, our ability to utilize NOLs and tax credits of companies that we have acquired or may acquire in the future may be subject to limitations. There is also a risk that regulatory changes, such as suspensions on the use of NOLs or other tax credits, or other unforeseen reasons, could cause our existing NOLs or tax credits to expire or otherwise be unavailable to reduce current or future income tax liabilities, including for state tax purposes. For these reasons, we may not be able to utilize a material portion of the NOLs and tax credits reflected on our balance sheet, which could potentially result in increased future tax liability to us and could adversely affect our operating results and financial condition.

An increasing number of jurisdictions have considered or adopted laws to impose tax obligations on companies without a physical presence in the jurisdiction. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that online sellers can be required to collect sales and use tax despite not having a physical presence in the buyer's state. State or local governments may adopt, or begin to enforce, laws requiring us to calculate, collect, and remit sales and use taxes in their jurisdictions. Similarly, many foreign jurisdictions have considered or adopted laws that impose obligations related to value-added taxes, digital services taxes, or other taxes on companies without a physical presence in the foreign jurisdiction. A successful assertion by one or more state or local governments or foreign jurisdictions requiring us to collect taxes where we presently do not do so, or to collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently collect some taxes, could result in substantial tax liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as penalties and interest. Obligations to calculate, collect and remit sales, value-added, digital services, or other taxes in jurisdictions in which we have no physical presence could also create additional administrative burdens for us, put us at a competitive disadvantage if similar obligations are not imposed on our competitors, and decrease our future sales, which could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

We are subject to a variety of enacted and proposed federal, state, local and international laws, directives and regulations relating to the collection, use, security, transfer and other processing of personally identifiable information, along with other similar laws (e.g., wiretapping laws). We publicly post information about our privacy practices but we may be alleged to have failed to do so, which could subject us to potential regulatory or private party actions if such privacy practices are found to be noncompliant, deceptive, unfair, or misrepresentative. In the United States, these include enforcement actions by federal agencies and state attorneys general. In addition, privacy advocates and industry groups have regularly proposed, and may propose in the future, self-regulatory standards with which we must legally comply or that contractually apply to us. If we fail to follow these security standards even if no customer or user information is compromised, we may incur significant fines or experience a significant increase in costs or reputational harm. Additionally, under various privacy laws and other obligations, we may be required to obtain certain consents to process personal data. Our inability or failure to do so could result in adverse consequences. In the past few years, numerous U.S. states-including California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and Utah-have enacted comprehensive privacy laws that impose certain obligations on covered businesses, including providing specific disclosures in privacy notices and affording residents with certain rights concerning their personal data. As applicable, such rights may include the right to access, correct or delete certain personal data, and to opt-out of certain data processing activities, such as targeted advertising, profiling and automated decision-making. The exercise of these rights may impact our business and ability to provide our products and services. Certain states also impose stricter requirements for processing certain personal data, including sensitive information, such as conducting data privacy impact assessments. These state laws allow for statutory fines for noncompliance. For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA) (collectively, CCPA), provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as a private right of action for data breaches that is expected to increase data breach litigation. The CCPA may increase our compliance costs and potential liability, and adversely affect our business. Further, the CPRA, which became effective on January 1, 2023, significantly modifies the CCPA, including by expanding consumers' rights with respect to certain sensitive personal information. The CPRA also creates a new state agency that will be vested with authority to implement and enforce the CCPA and the CPRA. Aspects of these state privacy statutes remain unclear, resulting in further legal uncertainty and potentially requiring us to modify our data practices and policies and to incur substantial additional costs and expenses in an effort to comply. Outside the United States, an increasing number of laws, regulations, and industry standards may govern data privacy and security. For example, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), the United Kingdom's GDPR (UK GDPR), and China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) impose strict requirements for processing personal data. For example, under the EU GDPR, companies may face temporary or definitive bans on data processing and other corrective actions; fines of up to 20 million Euros or 4% of annual global revenue, whichever is greater; or private litigation related to processing of personal data brought by classes of data subjects or consumer protection organizations authorized at law to represent their interests. In Canada, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and various related provincial laws, as well as Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), may apply to our operations. In addition to the EU GDPR, the European Commission has another draft regulation, known as the Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications (ePrivacy Regulation), that would replace the current ePrivacy Directive. New rules related to the ePrivacy Regulation are likely to include enhanced consent requirements in order to use communications content and metadata, which may negatively impact our platform and products and our relationships with our customers. Complying with the EU GDPR and the ePrivacy Regulation, if and when the latter becomes effective, may cause us to incur substantial operational costs or require us to change our business practices. We may not be successful in our efforts to achieve compliance and may also experience difficulty retaining or obtaining new European or multi-national customers or significantly increased liability with respect to these customers pursuant to the terms set forth in our engagements with them. While we utilize data centers in the European Economic Area (EEA) to maintain certain customer and user data (which may include personal data) originating from the EU in the EEA, we may find it necessary to establish additional systems and processes to maintain such data in the EEA, which may involve substantial expense and distraction from other aspects of our business. Additionally, data localization requirements in other jurisdictions may cause us to incur potentially significant costs for establishing and maintaining facilities for storing and processing such data. In the ordinary course of business, we may transfer personal data from Europe and other jurisdictions to the United States or other countries. Europe and other jurisdictions have enacted laws requiring data to be localized or limiting the transfer of personal data to other countries. In particular, the EEA and the United Kingdom (UK) have significantly restricted the transfer of personal data to the United States and other countries whose privacy laws it believes are inadequate. Other jurisdictions may adopt similarly stringent interpretations of their data localization and cross-border data transfer laws. Although there are currently various mechanisms that may be used to transfer personal data from the EEA and UK to the United States in compliance with law, such as the EEA and UK's standard contractual clauses, these mechanisms are subject to legal challenges, and there is no assurance that we can satisfy or rely on these measures to lawfully transfer personal data to the United States. If there is no lawful manner for us to transfer personal data from the EEA, the UK or other jurisdictions to the United States, or if the requirements for a legally-compliant transfer are too onerous, we could face significant adverse consequences, including the interruption or degradation of our operations, the need to relocate part of or all of our business or data processing activities to other jurisdictions at significant expense, increased exposure to regulatory actions, substantial fines and penalties, the inability to transfer data and work with partners, vendors and other third parties, and injunctions against our processing or transferring of personal data necessary to operate our business. Additionally, companies that transfer personal data out of the EEA and UK to other jurisdictions, particularly to the United States, are subject to increased scrutiny from regulators, individual litigants, and activist groups. Some European regulators have ordered certain companies to suspend or permanently cease certain transfers out of Europe for allegedly violating the GDPR's cross-border data transfer limitations. Privacy and data protection laws and industry standards around the world may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our existing practices or product and platform capabilities. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines, lawsuits, regulatory actions and penalties, costs for remediation, and damage to our reputation, we could be required to fundamentally change our practices or modify our products and platform capabilities, any of which could have an adverse effect on our business. Furthermore, the laws, regulations, and policies that are applicable to the businesses of our customers may limit the use and adoption of, and reduce the overall demand for, our products. Privacy and data security concerns, whether valid or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our products, particularly in certain industries and foreign countries, including, for example, India, where new legislation is expected in the near term. Furthermore, in order to offer our products to certain customers, we may be required to comply with additional regulations. For example, to offer our products to certain customers in the healthcare industry, we may be required to implement certain security and privacy measures and related procedures to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). This may require us to execute HIPAA business associate agreements (BAAs) with certain customers that are "covered entities" under HIPAA, which would subject us to additional liabilities, penalties and fines in the event we fail to comply with the terms of such agreements. The storage of such information may require us to modify and enhance our platform at a significant cost.

Sales to higher spend customers involve risks that may not be present or that are present to a lesser extent with sales to smaller customers, such as longer sales cycles, more complex customer requirements, substantial upfront sales costs, and less predictability in completing some of our sales. For example, higher spend customers may require considerable time to evaluate and test our solutions and those of our competitors prior to making a decision on whether to subscribe to our platform. As a result, we may spend substantial time and resources on our sales efforts without any assurance that our efforts will produce a sale. Moreover, higher spend customers often begin to deploy our products on a limited basis, but nevertheless demand configuration, integration services and pricing negotiations, which increase our upfront investment in the sales effort with no guarantee that these customers will deploy our products widely enough across their organization to justify our substantial upfront investment.

In order to grow our business, we must continue to attract new customers in a cost-effective manner and enable these customers to realize the benefits associated with our products and services. Our business is usage-based and it is important for our business and financial results that our paying customers maintain or increase their usage of our platform and purchase additional products from us. Historically, we have relied on our self-service customer acquisition model for a significant majority of our revenue. We complement our self-service customer acquisition model with a sales force focused on inside sales, targeted outside sales and partnership opportunities to drive revenue growth. If our self-service customer acquisition model is not as effective as we anticipate or our sales force is not successful at growing our customer base, specifically our higher spend customers, our future growth will be impacted. In addition, we must persuade potential customers that our products offer significant advantages over those of our competitors. As our market matures, our products evolve, and competitors introduce lower cost or differentiated products that are perceived to compete with our platform and products, our ability to maintain or expand usage of our platform could be impaired. Even if we do attract new customers, the cost of new customer acquisition, product implementation and ongoing customer support may prove higher than anticipated, thereby impacting our profitability. Other factors, many of which are out of our control, may now or in the future impact our ability to add new customers in a cost-effective manner, include: - potential customers' commitments to existing platforms or greater familiarity or comfort with other platforms or products;- our failure to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel;- our failure to obtain or maintain industry security certifications for our platform and products;- negative media, industry, or financial analyst commentary regarding our platform and the identities and activities of some of our customers;- the perceived risk, commencement, or outcome of litigation; and - deteriorating general economic conditions. The vast majority of our contracts with our customers are based on our terms of service, which do not require our customers to commit to a specific contractual period, and which permit the customer to terminate their contracts or decrease usage of our products and services without advance notice. Our customers generally have no obligation to maintain their usage of our platform. This ease of termination could cause our results of operations to fluctuate significantly from quarter to quarter. Our customer retention may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including our customers' satisfaction with the security, performance, and reliability of our products, our prices and usage plans, our customers' budgetary restrictions, the perception that competitive products provide better or less expensive options, negative public perception of us or our customers, and deteriorating general economic conditions. As a result, we may face high rates of customer churn if we are unable to meet our customer needs, requirements and preferences. Our future financial performance also depends in part on our ability to expand our existing customers' usage of our platform and sell additional products to our existing customers. Conversely, our paying customers may reduce their usage to lower-cost pricing tiers if they do not see the marginal value in maintaining their usage at a higher-cost pricing tier, thereby impacting our ability to increase revenue. In order to expand our commercial relationships with our customers, existing customers must decide that the incremental cost associated with such an increase in usage or subscription to additional products is justified by the additional functionality. Our customers' decision whether to increase their usage or subscribe to additional products is driven by a number of factors, including customer satisfaction with the security, performance, and reliability of our platform and existing products, the functionality of any new products we may offer, general economic conditions, and customer reaction to our pricing model. If our efforts to expand our relationships with our existing customers are not successful, our financial condition and results of operations may materially suffer. In addition, to encourage awareness, usage, familiarity and adoption of our platform and products, we may offer a credit or other incentives to new customers who sign up for and use our platform. To the extent that we are unable to successfully retain customers after use of the initial incentives, we will not realize the intended benefits of these marketing strategies and our ability to grow our revenue will be adversely affected.

We rely on third-party software providers and other partners for many essential financial and operational services to support our business, including, without limitation, encryption and authentication technology, infrastructure operations, certain database services, employee email, content delivery to customers, back-office support, credit card processing and other functions. These vendors provide their services to us via a cloud-based model instead of software that is installed on our premises. As a result, we depend upon these vendors to provide us with services that are always available and are free of errors or defects that could cause disruptions in our business processes. Any failure by these vendors to do so, or any disruption in our ability to access the internet, would materially and adversely affect our ability to manage our operations. In addition, although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect customer and user data and prevent data loss and other security breaches, including systems and processes designed to reduce the impact of a security breach at a third-party service provider, such measures cannot provide absolute security. Furthermore, if these services become unavailable or are no longer available to us on commercially reasonable terms due to circumstances beyond our control, such as an acquisition of our third-party provider, our expenses could increase, our ability to access certain data could be interrupted, and our processes for providing certain services to our customers could be impaired until equivalent services, if available, are identified, obtained and implemented, all of which could adversely affect our business.