The Company That Took Down The Internet

What exactly does Cloudflare do, and why do so many websites depend on them?

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[MAN-ppqg]

This is why too much centralization in ANY domain is a bad idea: programming, politics, finance, logistics, McDonald's ice cream machine repair technicians, you name it. Always, always, always have a back up plan.

[rodryguezzz]

We also had a similar problem last week here in Portugal. There was an outage at an Equinix datacenter in Lisbon, and multiple websites, including banks and public services, were down for a few hours.

[herkulessi]

Don't forget the 2018 fun: In less than a minute cloudflare changed a firewallrule worldwide to get rid of an exploit. Worked like a charm: 80% traffic drop. Which was caused by CPU-Overload in the Firewall. Whoopsie

[I_am_Allan]

17 days later, Rogers had BGP issues, and crashed 90% of Canadian stores, 9-1-1 services, and about 1/3 of Canadian's couldn't access the internet, or use their cellphones, home phones, or home TV services. Ah, what a marvellous world we live in.

[telefactfiles]

Most of the new sites attracts to cloudflare because their free tier is super generous and they provide free SSL

[mohitgumber]

funfact : Chess Olympiad was declared a draw after a widespread internet outage interrupted play in 2020, making India and Russia joint winners. I remember seeing it live that day, it was intense.

[soogymoogi]

I remember as a teen in the late 00s/early 2010s when I used to play a Neopets/Gaia mashup game named Subeta the site was constantly having issues with Cloudflare (the DNS service part iirc). Idk what it was about Subeta specifically that made Cloudflare act up or visa versa, but I remember that error page well.

[notenoughmonkeys]

2:09 - "A single point of failure for a huge portion of the internet". I'm sure this is a perfectly apt description of quite a few social websites out there... especially those that went dark recently, or smelling a tad musky.

[kymotsujason]

Like or not, Cloudflare is the gateway for the Internet. Their services are just so good, it's difficult to justify not using them for web services. It'd be great if we could have more competitors and more options, but there's just no one on their level.

[gerowen]

I mean, I get that it's essentially a glorified load balancer, but this much centralization of the internet is a dangerous thing.

[erice]

In Sweden we had a fun outage a few years back, I believe it was spring 2018. Some workers cut a fiber line while doing some construction work. Apparently this fiber line was the main trunk between the southern part of Sweden and the central part of Sweden. Absolutely nothing worked were I live. There was no cellphone or regular phone service since all pbx services are since a decade or a maybe more like a fee decades completely digital. Since there was no phone or internet there was no way to purchase anything without cash and we were unable to use our ATMs since they are connected to our banking system through the internet, or the phone network as a backup The reason for this is because the ATM always checks your account balance before you can withdraw anything (at least that's how I understand it).
Talk about getting some idea of how it would be if we get a powerful sun flare😁 That for sure is something I'm NOT looking forward to.
It took them about 10-12 hours to get the line repaired so it would work again, part of that was finding the cut because the workers who cut it hadn't noticed. The one thing Telia, (one of the biggest, if not the biggest ISP in Sweden and also the owner of the fiber) never cleared up is why the redundant connection didn't work at all; however, I've heard some people speculating that both cables actually got cut because the cut happened right outside the building with the ISPs equipment. However, looking at the options, they aren't that many.
~They cut both cables.
~The config where bad so the fail over simply didn't work.
~Faulty equipment that for some reason had not been swapped and because of that the fail over didn't work.
Those are the options I can think of.
Any other ideas folks? 😊

[drane]

As DOTA player, I accept this LOL article as a challenge

[wolphin]

On this same thread... an oops by Roger's took out Interac for several hours, causing Canadians to not be able to buy anything with Debit or Credit Cards across the country, as Interac may have had redundant data links... they were from the same ISP. It also took out internet for all their other customers too. Then few months later... another issue took out several provinces 911 services!

[MindstabThrull]

For many years, I always thought CDN meant "Canadian" because I live in, well, Canada. It took me some time to realize that it meant something completely different.

[joed]

I love you trying to explain the weird things about my life and lively hood to people who don’t understand or have insight into how the internet actually works now

[decoohh]

Cloudflare 🤝 AWS
Taking half the internet down if they goof

[dyedie]

I was awake during this and it was CRAZY, every other website I tried was down with some ngix error popping up.

[legominimovieproductions]

And then there was the one time an employee was told to dismantle an old used rack, pulled one fibre out and killed the entire Cloudflare customer access😂

[kelpsie]

0:47 - Anyone know what this is referring to?

[Starfals]

Amazing, 1 thing goes down and everything goes poof. Thats what happens when everyone relies on that 1 thing... No matter how good that thing is, it will eventually fail. Even if its just 1 time every 10 years, disruptions will be hard to avoid. This video finally explains what Cloudflare is, i never knew and i kept on wondering.

Techquckie doing its job <3