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Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

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461–470 of 601 posts

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how decentralization helps though. People in a bazzar are going to care even less about sharing shadow knowledge. Linux IMO succeeds not because of the bazaar but because of Linus.

What is the shadow knowledge in this case?

Also curious, since the bazaar seems to be where one acquires shadow knowledge (grey market items, support structures for unregistered people etc.). See Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong for a practical example.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#462
If I'm remembering correctly, there was another outage around 10 days ago.

It still surprises me that there are basically no free alternatives comparable to Cloudflare. Putting everything on CF creates a pretty serious single point of failure.

It's strange that in most industries you have at least two major players, like Coke vs. Pepsi or Nike vs. Adidas. But in the CDN/edge space, there doesn't seem to be a real free competitor that matches Cloudflare's feature set.

It feels very unhealthy for the ecosystem. Does anyone know why this is the case?

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#463

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…

> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.

I’m tired of this sentiment. Imagine if people said, why develop your own cloud offering? Can you really do better than VMWare..?

Innovation in technology has only happened because people dared to do better, rather than giving up before they started…

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#464
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope he doesn't ignore it, the internet has been forgiving enough toward cloudflares string of failures..its getting pretty old, and creates a ton of choas. I work with life saving devices, being impacted in any way in data monitoring has a huge impact in many ways. "sorry ma'am we can't give your child t1d readings on your follow app because our provider decided to break everything in the pursuit of some react bug…

Half your medical devices are probably opening up data leakage to China. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3814810/backdoor-in-chines... Most hospital and healthcare IT teams are extremely under funded, undertrained, overworked, and the software, configurations and platforms are normally not the most resilient things. I have a friend at one in the North East right now going through a hell of a security breach for mul…

Most of DICOM data sharing is over unencrypted ports. Every sniffer can easily extract super-sensible data. Not only China, everywhere.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#466

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. I disagree; most people need only a subset of Cloudflare's features. Operating just that subset avoids the risk of the other moving parts (that you don't need anyway) ruining your day. Cloudflare is also a business and has its own priorities like releasing new features; this is detrimental to you because you…

>The only feature Cloudflare (or its competitors) offers that can't be done cost-effectively yourself is volumetric DDoS protection

.... And thanks to AI everyone needs that all the time now since putting a site on the Internet means an eternal DDoS attack.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#467
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does relying on larger players result in better overall uptime for smaller players? AWS is providing me better uptime than if I assembled something myself because I am less resourced and less talented than that massive team. If so, is it a good or bad trade to have more overall uptime but when things go down it all goes down together?

> AWS is providing me better uptime than if I assembled something myself because I am less resourced and less talented than that massive team. Is it? I can’t say that my personal server has been (unplanned) down at any time in the past 10 years, and these global outages have just flown right past it.

Have your ISP never went down? Or did it went down in some night and you just never realized.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#468

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 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).

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#469

If I'm remembering correctly, there was another outage around 10 days ago. It still surprises me that there are basically no free alternatives comparable to Cloudflare. Putting everything on CF creates a pretty serious single point of failure. It's strange that in most industries you have at least two major players, like Coke vs. Pepsi or Nike vs. Adidas. But in the CDN/edge space, there doesn't seem to be a real fre…

I reckon AWS is "free enough" for most of its users, but it's not as easy nor as safe for the common user.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#470

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…

"My architecture depends upon a single point of failure" is a great way to get laughed out of a design meeting. Outsourcing that single point of failure doesn't cure my design of that flaw, especially when that architecture's intended use-case is to provide redundancy and fault-tolerance.

The problem with pursuing efficiency as the primary value prop is that you will necessarily end up with a brittle result.

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