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The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

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Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#121

Post by WJW »

Xelbair wrote: post #75
stroebs wrote: post #21

The problem is far more nuanced than the internet simply becoming too centralised. I want to host my gas station network’s air machine infrastructure, and I only want people in the US to be able to access it. That simple task is literally impossible with what we have allowed the internet to become. FWIW I love Cloudflare’s products and make use of a large amount of them, but I can’t advocate for using them in my prof…

Genuine question - why are you spending time and effort on geofencing when you could spend it on improving your software/service? It takes time and effort for no gain in any sensible business goal. People outside of US won't need it, bad actors will spoof their location, and it might inconvenience your real customers. And if you want a secure communication just setup zero-trust network.

> bad actors will spoof their location

Isn't that exactly the point? Why are North Korean hackers even allowed to connect to the service, and why is spoofing location still so easy and unverifiable?

Nobody is expected to personally secure their physical location against hostile state actors. My office is not artillery proof, nor does it need to be: hostile actions against it would be an act of war and we have the military to handle those kind of things. But with cybersecurity suddenly everyone is expected to handle everyone from the script kiddie next door to the Mossad. I see the point in OPs post: perhaps it would be good if locking down were a little easier than "just setup zero-trust network".

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#125

Post by markus_zhang »

krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

It’s too few and far between. It’s gonna make some changes if it’s a monthly event. If businesses start to lose connection for 8 hours every month, maybe the bigger ones are going to run for self hosting or at least some capacity of self hosting.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#126

Post by ovo101 »

Outages like this highlight just how much of the internet’s resilience depends on a single provider. In a way, it’s a healthy reminder: if one company’s hiccup can take down half the web, maybe we’ve over‑centralized. A “good thing” only if it sparks more serious conversations about redundancy, multi‑provider strategies, and reducing monoculture risk. Otherwise, we’ll just keep repeating the same failure modes at larger scales.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#127

Post by rafaelcosta »

I don't get why this applies on the Cloudflare outage but not on the AWS ones... I'd argue that the big cloud providers are WAY more impactful when they go down than Cloudflare. The only difference is that the average techie uses Cloudflare more and sees the impact more, but this point was already there before...

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#128

Post by BlackFly »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #58
krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

If anything, centralisation shields companies using a hyperscaler from criticism. You’ll see downtime no matter where you host. If you self host and go down for a few hours, customers blame you. If you host on AWS and “the internet goes down”, then customers treat it akin to an act of God, like a natural disaster that affects everyone. It’s not great being down for hours, but that will happen regardless. Most compani…

I think this really depends on your industry.

If you cannot give a patient life saving dialysis because you don't have a backup generator then you are likely facing some liability. If you cannot give a patient life saving dialysis because your scheduling software is down because of a major outage at a third party and you have no local redundancy then you are in a similar situation. Obviously this depends on your jurisdiction and probably we are in different ones, but I feel confident that you want to live in a district where a hospital is reasonably responsible for such foreseeable disasters.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#129

Post by 1718627440 »

rainonmoon wrote: post #115
dijit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in both cases you're setting up a webserver. I guess you're concerned about lateral network movement? Justified, but as long as it's patched it's going to be just as secure.

You're right, but with an asterisk. I don't care if my DO droplet gets popped with an RCE. I do care if someone establishes persistence in my home.

You can have different networks in your physical home.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#130

Post by LoganDark »

chii wrote: post #26
captainkrtek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. I agree wholeheartedly. The only change is internal to these organizations (eg: CloudFlare, AWS) Improvements will be made to the relevant systems, and some teams internally will also audit for similar behavior, add tests, and fix some bugs. However, nothing external will change. The cycle of pretending like you are going to impleme…

the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime. Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable. So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.

> Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't.

What? Since when has anyone ever been free to just up and stop paying for power from the grid? Are you going to pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have another power company install lines? Do you even have another power company in the area? State? Country? Do you even have permission for that to happen near your building? Any building?

The same is true for internet service, although personally I'd gladly pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have literally anything else at my location, but there are no proper other wired providers and I'll die before I ever install any sort of cellular router. Also this is a rented apartment so I'm fucked even if there were competition, although I plan to buy a house in a year or two.

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