Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 601 posts

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#551

Post by wat10000 »

tazjin wrote: post #540
wat10000 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is literally how a large fraction of airlines work. It's called Amadeus, and it did have a big global outage not too long ago.

Which should be a good example of why this should be avoided.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#552

Post by toomuchtodo »

locknitpicker wrote: post #506
toomuchtodo wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a customer of Cloudflare, and not happy, I encourage you to evaluate other providers more to your liking. Perhaps you'll find someone more fitting to your use case and operational preferences, but perhaps not. My day job org pays Cloudflare hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and am satisfied with how they operate. Everyone has choice, exercise it if you choose. I'm sure your account exec would be hap…

> you are a customer of Cloudflare, and not happy, I encourage you to evaluate other providers more to your liking. I think your take is terribly simplistic. In a professional setting, virtually all engineers have no say on whether the company switches platforms or providers. Their responsibility is to maintain and develop services that support business. The call to switch a provider is ultimately a business and stra…

> Some of you sound like amateurs toying with pet projects, where today it's framework A on cloud provider X whereas tomorrow it's framework B on cloud provider Y. Come the next day, rinse and repeat. This is unthinkable in any remotely professional setting.

Vendor contracts have 1-3 year terms. We (a financial services firm) re-evaluate tech vendors every year for potential replacement and technologists have direct input into these processes. I understand others may operate under a different vendor strategy. As a vendor customer, your choices are to remain a customer or to leave and find another vendor. These are not feelings, these are facts. If you are unhappy but choose not to leave a vendor, that is a choice, but it is your choice to make, and unless you are a large enough customer that you have leverage over the vendor, these are your only options.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#553

Post by kordlessagain »

vpShane wrote: post #248
zwnow wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kudos"? This is like the South Park episode in which the oil company guy just excuses himself while the company just continues to fuck up over and over again. There's nothing to praise, this shouldn't happen twice in a month. Its inexcusable.

twice in a month _so far_

reaching for that _one 9 of uptime_

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#554

Post by hunter2_ »

esrauch wrote: post #549
psychoslave wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's like saying if one single point of failure in a global food supply chain fails, nobody's going to eat today. And which is in contrast to if some supplier fails to provide a local food truck today their customers will have to go to the restaurant next door.

Ah ok, it is true that if there's a lot of fungible offerings that worse but uncorrelated uptime can be more robust. I think the question then is how much of the Internet has fungible alternatives such that uncorrelated downtime can meaningfully be less impact. If you have a "to buy" shopping list, the existence of alternative shopping list products doesn't help you, when the one you use is down it's just down, the s…

The restaurant-next-door analogy, representing fungibility, isn't quite right. If BofA is closed and you want to do something in person with them, you can't go to an unrelated bank. If Spotify goes down for an hour, you're not likely to become a YT Music subscriber as a stopgap even though they're somewhat fungible. You'll simply wait, and the question is: can I shuffle my schedule instead of elongating it?

A better analogy is that if the restaurant you'll be going to is unexpectedly closed for a little while, you would do an after-dinner errand before dinner instead and then visit the restaurant a bit later. If the problem affects both businesses (like a utility power outage) you're stuck, but you can simply rearrange your schedule if problems are local and uncorrelated.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#555

Post by winddude »

z00z1 wrote: post #548
winddude wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy , they are tiny compared to CF, their revenue is high because they focus on large enterprise clients.

> 20% of internet traffic passes through CF networks That does not sound right to me. “20 percent of websites” does not mean “20 percent of traffic.”. There is no public write-up from Cloudflare that proves “we handle 20% of all Internet traffic.” Cloudflare reports around 295,000 paying customers and more than 30 million Internet properties (20% of the web). So most of their users are on the free plan.

agreed, cloudflare says 20% of all websties, which makes sense, digging into it the "20% of all web traffic" seems to have been like a game of telephone in media, social media, and/or AI.

I can't believe they only have 295,000 paying customer, that puts me in a small minority. lol

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#556

Post by oasisbob »

cpncrunch wrote: post #435
filleduchaos wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rather disingenuous to backpedal from "you can easily block them" to "is that a problem? who even cares" when someone points out that you cannot in fact easily block them.

I was referring to legitimate ones, which you can easily block. Obviously there are scammy ones as well, and yes it is an issue, but for most sites I would say the cloudflare cure is worse than the problem it's trying to cure.

No true scotsman needs Cloudflare, as any true scotsman can block AI bots themselves is not a strong argument.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#557

Post by foobarkey »

gerdesj wrote: post #427
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…

All of my company's hosted web sites have way better uptimes and availability than CF but we are utterly tiny in comparison. With only some mild blushing, you could describe us as "artisanal" compared to the industrial monstrosities, such as Cloudflare. Time and time again we get these sorts of issues with the massive cloudy chonks and they are largely due to the sort of tribalism that used to be enshrined in the phr…

Sorry for the downvotes but this is true many times with some basic HA you get better uptime than the big cloud boys, yes their stack and tech is fancier but we also need to factor in how much CF messes with it vs self hosted, anyway the self hosted wisdom is RIP these days and I mostly just run cf pages / kv :)

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#558

Post by stef25 »

cpncrunch wrote: post #138

I've noticed that in recent months, even apart from these outages, cloudflare has been contributing to a general degradation and shittification of the internet. I'm seeing a lot more "prove you're human", "checking to make sure you're human", and there is normally at the very least a delay of a few seconds before the site loads. I don't think this is really helping the site owners. I suspect it's mainly about AI exto…

> I've noticed that in recent months, even apart from these outages, cloudflare has been contributing to a general degradation and shittification of the internet. I'm seeing a lot more "prove you're human", "checking to make sure you're human", and there is normally at the very least a delay of a few seconds before the site loads.

Good to know I'm not the only one

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#559

Post by fallous »

locknitpicker wrote: post #514
fallous wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> "My architecture depends upon a single point of failure" is a great way to get laughed out of a design meeting. This is a simplistic opinion. Claiming services like Cloudflare are modeled as single points of failure is like complaining that your use of electricity to power servers is a single point of failure. Cloudflare sells a global network of highly reliable edge servers running services like caching, firewall,…

Your electricity to servers IS a single point of failure, if all you do is depend upon the power company to reliably feed power. There is a reason that co-location centers have UPS and generator backups for power.

It may have been unthinkable to some casual observers that creating a giant single point of failure for the internet was a bad idea but it was entirely thinkable to others.

Re: Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

#560

Post by Akronymus »

esrauch wrote: post #538
ccakes wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure I follow the argument. If literally every individual site had an uncorrelated 99% uptime, that's still less available than a centralized 99.9% uptime. The "entire Internet" is much less available in the former setup. It's like saying that Chipotle having X% chance of tainted food is worse than local burrito places having 2*X% chance of tainted food. It's true in the lens that each individual event affect…

Also what about individual sites having 99% uptime while behind CF with an uncorrelated uptime of 99.9%?

Just because CF is up doesnt mean the site is

Post reply on HN