You must not have been paying attention when that one Java programmer quit and took his code with him.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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I didn't even notice that it went down.
It took down a fifth of the Internet, not half.
I found two websites that didn't work, that's it.
A third of the “top 100” were in that 1/5th total. Most websites I personally wanted were down, including lemmy for me.
Lemmy and ipchicken.com were down for me.
Being a good CDN is an expensive exercise that requires the ability to run POPs in many countries around the world.
Cloudflare captured the market by basically being simultaneously much cheaper, better distributed and ultimately better performing than the incumbents at the time (Akamai and Limelight IIRC)
The rest of the story is capitalism doing capitalist things
I find it at least concerning for CloudFlare's change control process. Apparently some new traffic analysis config took half the web? Maybe test things a little more?
Obviously it is concerning. We have just been given a window of a glimpse as to what would happen if one service in which so many things rely on, gets messed up. Like today I was having trouble logging into my bank because guess what, they rely on CloudFlare.
I've read individuals relying on services provided by CloudFlare, their processes were interrupted.
I know that CloudFlare has a purpose and its purpose is being served, but there's a reason why people love and should embrace the idea of multiple alternatives and hate monopolies.
It would be like, if Comcast as an ISP has a blackout, do you know how many subscribers they have? Some people in certain areas are all that they have so the blackout would knock them offline for however long. That's why alternatives are important.
I barely noticed
I didn't, just people bitching after
How does one company have that much impact?
Because they are a very good CDN and provide excellent DDos protection. They then expanded to do a whole host of other things, to the point where they do pretty much everything. Basically, they have become the first name most folks think of when they want to put something on the internet. A one stop shop for your web hosting needs. Wouldn't surprise me to learn they rent servers and VPS's as well.
Been seeing it in the selfhosting communities and subreddits for a while now. "Oh I want to put this selfhosted service on the internet. I should put it behind Cloudflare!" Most of the time it's not needed in that context.
Do you think that's concerning?
Well, they did just take out "half" of the internet today so.... In general, if it seems like "everyone" is using a single service, it's probably a good idea to see if an alternative exists and will suit your needs. Which reminds me, I should probably start looking for a replacement for Tailscale. They're starting to look a bit like Cloudflare to me, in the sense that "everyone", including myself tends to recommend them as a VPN.
It's good that it goes down once in a while, so that people notice.
Amazon the other week, then this. Really does show how vulnerable much of the net is
it's very concerning, but what are the alternatives?
Well, lemmy. That worked fine.
my lemmy was down
Multiple instances gives redundancy
You need to create your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers.
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(4 replies)
People have other things to worry about. It's concerning but there is a barrage of shit going on that this barely registers. And companies will always choose what's cheap in the short term. They believe the risk of something going wrong is small enough to warrant the possibly large impact. It's like that everywhere: in the car industry, chocolate industry, clothing industry, and so on. There's always one seemingly small decision that could fuck up the entire company but isn't worth investing in in the short term.
I wish cloudfare (whatever it is and whatever it does) had more reach and went down for longer. For so long that competitors would be considered. But alas...
I think it's very concerning, but not exactly surprising. It makes sense that there ends up being market leaders for digital services, because they can provide economies of scale much more than traditional services. As another commentor pointed out, they're are alternatives, even just for back-up service providers, but most sites don't pay for them.
What was more personally distressing was I realised how much I rely on lemmy when my instance, and backup instance, both went down. I'm not sure where I'd go for immediate news, especially about something niche like "why is lemmy down?". I don't use other social media and I found myself checking r/redditalternatives just to see if there was some info about the shutdown. Obviously, it was useless because reddit...