When damn near every single essential service is built on the same infrastructure of tissue paper and chewed bubble gum, it shouldn't surprise everyone when it collapses all at once.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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It was google. Chatgpt and claudeai were down so i said oh hey let me try gemeni. What happened that day? By coincidence gemeni 3 came out
translation: we don't fucking know
No translation was really needed. They outright stated that they didnt know yet.
"You see, half the internet went down because people used our services a little too much."
Ok wtf???
How does cloudflare not have DOS detection?
That was based on anecdotal evidence, at the time. The real cause was Cloudflare shooting themselves in foot again because of a bad config file.
The bad config file is somewhere in the middle of the chain of causality.
They changed database permissions, revealing a dormant bug in a database query, leading to config files being generated badly with duplicate lines, making them too large for intake by the bot detection service, which didn't have good input validation and made the process panic instead, ruining the service.
Lmao
All the people trying to cash out their Dr. Pepper points?
Aren't spikes in unusual traffic the exact thing Cloudflare is supposed to protect you from?
Traffic spikes, on the Internet? One in a million chance! Now tow cloudflare outside the environment and call it a day.
Task failed successfully.
Fission Mailed
They protected the endpoints. They just weren't able to route traffic to them. Id bet it takes a MUCH larger ddos to bring cloudflare to its knees vs your average website.
From a Cloudflare customer's point of view, I don't care if my site is down from a DDOS or a Cloudflare outage, but the latter seems to happen more often.
As it stands? Cloudflare is still incredibly effective at protecting customers from those DDOS attacks. Which, depending on your hosting solution, can mean very noticeable monetary savings because YOUR hardware/connection didn't spike. And, regardless, can mean noticeable monetary savings as your engineers didn't need to recover a crashed system because your setup was just sitting there idle.
That said: If you truly need high availability? You need to do what downdetector did and have alternatives ready in the event that Cloudflare falls over. Same as with your ISP... which should be ISPs plural.
From another cloudflare customer, if our sites still work internally it's marginally better than them being broken both inside and outside the org as they would be if they were ddosed directly. I guess it depends on what kind of services you're running.
Yeah, but just one "unusual spike in traffic" - so it seems. /s
ostensibly sure. But it's like car insurance. People pay them no matter what so why bother doing what they promised?
Amazon is now saving Americans from the crippling debt most of them seem to get into to drive a shiny box.. I wasn't expecting that.
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Did someone google Google again?
Probably pointed one Google mirror at another Google mirror
My bad, I started downloading The Lord of the Rings movies - Extended Edition. Sorry!
How many times have I told you not to download movies or games in the middle of the day? You'll tie up the phone lines.
Ok mum I stopped torrenting. You can use the phone again.
You can tell we're all old as fuck Millennials, because nobody else would make this joke. Lol.
I can't even explain dial up modems to my son because I'd have to start by explaining what phone lines are.
It wasn't about the lines. It was always about the switches. And while they are no longer actual hardware, but rather software, those are still the what makes phones work.
I had a Gen Z person ask me how I got a "3D printer save button" when I had a floppy disk for some reason.
Indeed.
"...you must first invent the universe".
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I had fully forgotten the phrase "you'll tie up the phone line!" And I just had a nam style flashback of sneaking internet time during the day when my mom was at work, and praying that no one tried to call
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Which AI scraper went rogue this time?
It was actually the system Cloudflare uses to catch and block bots that went haywire.
They had a fake database you could query that would pull content from a bunch of different shard databases. They updated the config so that systems querying it could see the shards in addition to the main dummy DB. The tool that pulled data out of it assumed that it could only see the dummy, however, so it just asked for everything when it pulled a report to pass to the filtering system.
The filtering system assumed the report it received would be properly formed and crashed if it got one that was malformed.
Gemini 3 was released today 👀
Mabe the new bezos Prometheus?
Did I miss something? Is everyone downloading the Epstein files today?
I hope more websites will move away from cloudflare. I could not access 90% of the web anymore. This is insane if just 1 company goes down, the whole internet is dead. The internet is broken!
and it's fucking annoying to check the box to "prove you're a human" when trying to access almost any site. some days it will make me do it three times before letting me through
I understand the need for anti-bot or DDoS protection, but there are better and free options today. Like Anubis. So please, in the love of The Internet, move away from cloudflare. Ideally yesterday already.
Edit: or run your own decent firewall with geo blocks. FireHOL block lists. Intrusion detection.
Setting up fail2ban. . Etc. Etc.
Anubis isn't even comparable to cloudflare. The reason cloudflare is so effective is that they can oversee which IPs are spamming or being abusive to certain websites, and can throw up protections quickly. There are a number of negative implications that come with this, but it's quite good at its primary job.
Anubis is just a prompt that wastes CPU cycles and tries to make it more expensive for AI crawlers to do so (since they care a lot about compute costs, of course). There is no bot protection or anything happening. The "making sure you're not a bot" is quite misleading imo
Anubis is to protect against scraping from LLMs, it has nothing to do with DDoS protection. Not only that, but the Anubis Github repo recommends most people to use Cloudflare instead, since Anubis is the "nuclear" option.
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