Oh oh, looks like agentzh's code. A living legend
Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
451–460 of 601 posts
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#452This 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…
It's not as simple as that. What will result in more downtime, dependency on a single centralized service or not being behind Cloudflare? Clearly it's the latter or companies wouldn't be behind Cloudflare. Sure, the outages are more widespread now than they used to be, but for any given service the total downtime is typically much lower than before centralization towards major cloud providers and CDNs.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
That bit may be true, but the underlying error of a null reference that caused a panic was exactly the same in both incidents.
Yep: it is wild for them to claim that a strongly-typed language would have saved them when it didn't. Relying on language features instead of writing code well will always eventually backfire.
Relying on code ninja ego backfires way sooner, and way more often.
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Why is that the only option? Cloudflare could offer solutions that let people run their software themselves, after paying some license fee. Or there could be many companies people use instead, instead of everyone floc…
What do you think Cloudflare’s core business is? Because I think it’s two things: 1. DDoS protection 2. Plug n’ Play DNS and TLS (termination) Neither of those make sense for self-hosted. Edit: If it’s unclear, #2 doesn’t make sense because if you self-host, it’s no longer plug n’ play. The existing alternatives already serve that case equally well (even better!).
Cloudflare Zero-Trust is also very core to their enterprise business.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
With all due respect, your dedicated server is not quite as complex as Cloudflare...
Eppur si muove. A random server serving things is exactly what the internet was supposed to be: a decentralized network of nodes.
I agree, I was just commenting that your single server being simpler is less affected by entropy :)
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#456> This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems.
True, as long as you don't call unwrap!
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#457Whats going on with cloudflare's software team? I have seen similar bugs in cloudflare API recently as well. There is an endpoint for a feature that is available only to enterprise users, but the check for whether the user is on an enterprise plan is done at the last step.
My guess? Code written by AI
No, the original author left long time ago. And nobody understands some uncovered parts anymore.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no sweet spot I've found. I don't work for Cloudflare but when I did have a status indicator to maintain, you could never please everyone. Users would complain when our system was up but a dependent system was down, saying that our status indicator was a lie. "Fixing" that by marking our system as down or degraded whenever a dependent system was down led to the status indicator being not green regularly, caus…
> "Fixing" that by marking our system as down or degraded whenever a dependent system was down led to the status indicator being not green regularly, causing us to unfairly develop a reputation as unreliable (most broken dependencies had limited blast radius). This seems like an issue with the design of your status page. If the broken dependencies truly had a limited blast radius, that should've been able to be commu…
> all you did by removing the status page was hide it
True, but everyone that actually made the company work was much happier for it.
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You call it extortion of the AI companies, but isn’t stealing/crawling/hammering a site to scrape their content to resell just as nefarious? You can easily block ChatGPT and most other AI scrapers if you want: https://habeasdata.neocities.org/ai-bots
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?
Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
#460This 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…
On the other hand, as long as the entire internet goes down when Cloudflare goes down, I'll be able to host everything there without ever getting flack from anyone.