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Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#471

Post by kentm »

Aeolun wrote: post #459
james2doyle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just using robots.txt and asking "pretty please, don’t scrape me". Here is an article (from TODAY) about the case where Perplexity is being accused of ignoring robots.txt: https://www.theverge.com/news/839006/new-york-times-perplexi... If you think a robots.txt is the answer to stopping the billion-dollar AI machine from scraping you, I don’t know what to say.

If someone has a robots.txt, and I want to request their page, but I want to do that in an automated way, should I open the browser to do it instead of issue a curl request? How about if I am going to ask claude to fetch the page for me?

Respect the robots.txt and don’t do it?

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#472

Post by Klonoar »

mixedbit wrote: post #366

This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outage…

> Rust won't help, people will always make mistakes, also in Rust.

They don't just use Rust for "protection", they use it first and foremost for performance. They have ballpark-to-matching C++ performance with a realistic ability to avoid a myriad of default bugs. This isn't new.

You're playing armchair quarterback with nothing to really offer.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#473

Post by sema4hacker »

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #468
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I share this sentiment. First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here. As to architecture: Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. But there’s a more interesting argume…

That's an interesting point, but in many (most?) cases productivity doesn't depend on all services being available at the same time. If one service goes down, you can usually be productive by using an alternative (e.g. if HN is down you go to Reddit, if email isn't working you catch up with Slack).

If HN, Reddit, email, Slack and everything else is down for a day, I think my productivity would actually go up, not down.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#474

Post by shermantanktop »

ccakes wrote: post #450
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I share this sentiment. First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here. As to architecture: Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. But there’s a more interesting argume…

> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. The point is that it doesn’t matter. A single site going down has a very small chance of impacting a large number of users. Cloudflare going down breaks an appreciable portion of the internet. If Jim’s Big Blog only maintains 95% uptime, most people won’t care. If BofA were at 95%.. actually same. Most of the…

Maybe worlds can just live without the internet for a few hours.

There are likely emergency services dependent on Cloudflare at this point, so I’m only semi serious.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#475

Post by m00dy »

mixedbit wrote: post #366

This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outage…

Obviously Rust is the answer to these kind of problems. But if you are cloudflare and have an important company at a global scale, you need to set high standarts for your rust code. Developers should dance and celebrate end of the day if their code compiles in rust.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#476

Post by wat10000 »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #396
mixedbit wrote: post #366

This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outage…

I’m not sure I share this sentiment. First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here. As to architecture: Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. But there’s a more interesting argume…

That’s fine if it’s just some random office workers. What if every airline goes down at the same time because they all rely on the same backend providers? What if every power generator shuts off? “Everything goes down simultaneously” is not, in general, something to aim for.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#477

Post by tobyjsullivan »

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #468
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I share this sentiment. First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here. As to architecture: Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. But there’s a more interesting argume…

That's an interesting point, but in many (most?) cases productivity doesn't depend on all services being available at the same time. If one service goes down, you can usually be productive by using an alternative (e.g. if HN is down you go to Reddit, if email isn't working you catch up with Slack).

Many (I’d speculate most) workflows involve moving and referencing data across multiple applications. For example, read from a spreadsheet while writing a notion page, then send a link in Slack. If any one app is down, the task is blocked.

Software development is a rare exception to this. We’re often writing from scratch (same with designers, and some other creatives). But these are definitely the exception compared to the broader workforce.

Same concept applies for any app that’s built on top of multiple third-party vendors (increasingly common for critical dependencies of SaaS)

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#478

Post by cbsmith »

mixedbit wrote: post #366

This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outage…

I find this sentiment amusing when I consider the vast outages of the "good ol' days".

What's changed is a) our second-by-second dependency on the Internet and b) news/coverage.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#479

Post by chii »

ccakes wrote: post #450
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I share this sentiment. First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here. As to architecture: Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. But there’s a more interesting argume…

> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so. The point is that it doesn’t matter. A single site going down has a very small chance of impacting a large number of users. Cloudflare going down breaks an appreciable portion of the internet. If Jim’s Big Blog only maintains 95% uptime, most people won’t care. If BofA were at 95%.. actually same. Most of the…

> If Cloudflare is at 99.95% then the world suffers

if the world suffers, those doing the "suffering" needs to push that complaint/cost back up the chain - to the website operator, which would push the complaint/cost up to cloudflare.

The fact that nobody did - or just verbally complained without action - is evidence that they didn't really suffer.

In the mean time, BofA saved cost in making their site 99.95% uptime themselves (presumably cloudflare does it cheaper than they could individually). So the entire system became more efficient as a result.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#480

Post by albedoa »

cpncrunch wrote: post #425
james2doyle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just using robots.txt and asking "pretty please, don’t scrape me". Here is an article (from TODAY) about the case where Perplexity is being accused of ignoring robots.txt: https://www.theverge.com/news/839006/new-york-times-perplexi... If you think a robots.txt is the answer to stopping the billion-dollar AI machine from scraping you, I don’t know what to say.

Yes, I was referring to legitimate companies, and Perplexity doesn't seem to be one of those.

Oh for sure. When he wrote of the AI companies that are "stealing/crawling/hammering", you thought he meant the legitimate ones that do honor robots.txt. That makes sense.
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