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Cloudflare was down

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Re: Cloudflare was down

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing that prevents you from recovering from a bad data file load in Rust. The programmer who wrote that code chose to crash.

That's exactly my point. There should be no such thing as choosing to crash if you want reliable software. Choosing to crash is idiomatic in Rust but not in managed languages in which exceptions are the standard way to handle errors.

I am not a C# guy, but I wrote a lot of Java back in the day, and I can authoritatively tell you that it has so-called "checked exceptions" that the compiler forces you to handle. However, it also has "runtime exceptions" that you are not forced to handle, and they can happen any where and any time. Conceptually, it is the same as error versus panic in Rust. One such runtime exception is the notorious `java.lang.NullPointerException` a/k/a the billion-dollar mistake. So even software in "managed" languages can and does crash, and it is way more likely to do so than software written in Rust, because "managed" languages do not have all the safety features Rust has.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The excuse: >A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. >The change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. >We will share more information as we have it today. https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lfrm31y6sw9q

It's quite an unfortunate coincidence that React has indirectly been the reason for two recent issues at Cloudflare haha

Two's a coincidence, three's a pattern; I guess we will have to wait until next month to see if it becomes a pattern. Was there a particular aspect of the React Server Components that made it easy to have this problem appear? would it have been caught or avoided in another framework or language?

Re: Cloudflare was down

#435
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of words for a 'might'. We don't know what caused the downtime.

Not this time; but the rewrite was certainly implicated in the previous one. They actually had two versions deployed; in response to unexpected configuration file size, the old version degraded gracefully, while the new version failed catastrophically.

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare was down

#437

Looking forward to the post mortem on this one. We weren't affected (just using the CDN), and people are saying they weren't affected who are using Cloudflare Workers (a previous culprit which we've since moved off), so I wonder what service / API was actually affected that brought down multiple websites with a 500 but not all of them. Wise was just down which is a pretty big one. Also odd how some websites were down…

The entire Cloud/SaaS story had a lot of happy-path cost optimization. The particular glitch that triggered the domino effect may be irrelevant relative to the fact that the effect reproduces.

Re: Cloudflare was down

#439
From the incident page:

A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share more information as we have it today.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lfrm31y6sw9q

Re: Cloudflare was down

#440
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it doesn't use cloudflare duh.?

From their response headers, it seems like the request is coming from NGINX directly. How do they defend themselves against DOS attacks?

Big server. And if it goes down it goes down? Who cares, it's hackernews.
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