You are right, accidents happen to anyone. I cannot really be prepared for Cloudflare to go down though. What are my alternatives? Turn it off and route traffic to our servers directly? The DNS propagation takes longer than it just took for our website to be available again.
It shouldn't - Cloudflare keeps the TTL for their cache-enabled records very low (like 300 seconds).
If you just log in to Cloudflare and click the "orange cloud" icon on the DNS tab, which points the domain back directly to your origin, you'll see the site up within a couple minutes.
It's very low compared to 24 hours, which is what used to be the most common setting and that (among other factors) was a big part of the "DNS propagation takes forever" mentality
