The Dexcom Follow app has experienced repeated, unannounced outages that leave patients and loved-ones without life-saving blood glucose data or alerts. We are urging Dexcom to implement proactive outage notifications and critical system redundancies to protect the safety of those who rely on this technology every day and night.

Petition: Demand Safety, Transparency, and Reliability from Dexcom Follow

For more than a decade, my family has relied on Dexcom technology to help keep my child with Type 1 diabetes safe. My child also has epilepsy, and hypoglycemia can trigger seizures. The Dexcom Follow app is not merely a convenience for us. It is a lifeline.

Last week that lifeline failed.

On December 5th at nearly 2 a.m. in California, I discovered—by chance—that I had not received Follow data for more than 90 minutes. There had been no alert. No expected “No Data” alarm. Nothing to indicate that the system so many people with Type 1 diabetes depend on had stopped working. Had my child’s blood sugar been dropping, we might have learned too late.

Dexcom’s public website showed all systems operational, so I turned to the Type 1 diabetes community. Dozens of parents and caregivers across multiple groups were reporting the same silence: no data, no warnings, no communication. Around the world nurses monitoring children at school, family members traveling for work, and parents monitoring sleeping children at home and sleepovers were suddenly realizing that the safety net they trusted had disappeared. Many others were sleeping and completely unaware of the issue.

When I called Dexcom Technical Support, the representative told me the Follow app was down due to an update and might be unavailable for several hours. He insisted the information had been posted online and ended the call abruptly when I tried to explain why this lack of notice posed a significant safety risk. Meanwhile, Followers in the United States were addressing hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia and scrambling to create makeshift safety strategies in the middle of the night—baby monitors, sleeping on floors in children’s rooms, and recurrent observation—because Dexcom had given them no warning and no alternative.

Later, Dexcom attributed the outage to a Cloudflare service problem. Whether this was a planned update, an external failure, or both remains unclear. What is clear is that this is not a one-off event. Families like mine have experienced repeated Dexcom Follow outages for years. Independent reviews document more than a dozen major Follow disruptions between 2020 and 2025 alone.

For a company operating in a critical area of healthcare, this level of unpredictability is unacceptable. Trust is earned through transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement—qualities the Follow system must urgently adopt.

We request that Dexcom take two immediate actions to protect the safety of its users and restore the trust of the community:

1. 1) Provide proactive, direct notifications for planned updates or anticipated service disruptions.
   Dexcom has email addresses and push-notification access for every Dexcom User and Follower. Both methods should be used to communicate with customers. Withholding critical information until after an outage is irresponsible and dangerous. Updates should also be scheduled to align with waking hours in relevant time zones—not overnight when most people with Type 1 diabetes are most vulnerable.
2. Establish redundancies or backup systems to prevent total loss of Follow data. Whether through secondary servers, alternative routing, or a mechanism that automatically pushes a “No Data” alert during a service outage, Dexcom must ensure that Followers are never left unaware when data disappears. Parents and other Followers, many of whom already have disrupted sleep due to Type 1 diabetes, need confidence that the systems with which they entrust their loved ones’ safety is reliable. While technology is imperfect, People living with Type 1 diabetes should not be placed at risk because a company fails to communicate or build robust infrastructure.

The phone greeting when contacting Dexcom Technical Support is from Dexcom’s President and Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Jake Leach. In that message he discusses his appreciation for the trust granted by Dexcom customers. Today, that trust is eroding. It can still be rebuilt—but only with concrete action.

Please sign this petition to urge Dexcom to make Dexcom Follow safe and reliable for the people who depend on it every minute of every day - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.