The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

Post by c0l0 » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 8:15 AM UTC

sjamaan wrote: post #37

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…

Same with the big Crowdstrike fail of 2024. Especially when everyone kept repeating the laughable statement that these guys have their shit in order, so it couldn't possibly be a simple fuckup on their end. Guess what, they don't, and it was. And nobody has realized the importance of diversity for resilience, so all the major stuff is still running on Windows and using Crowdstrike.

Post by vasco » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 8:19 AM UTC

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #85

vasco wrote: post #68

I'll die on the hill that centralization is more efficient than decentralization and that rare outages of hugely centralized systems that are otherwise highly reliable are much better than full decentralization with much worse reliability. In other words, when AWS or Cloudflare go down it's catastrophic in the sense that everyone sees the issues at the same time, but smaller providers usually have much more ongoing i…

Efficient in terms of what, exactly? There are multiple dimensions to this problem. Putting everything behind Cloudflare might give you better uptime, reliability, performance, etc. but it also has the effect of centralizing power into the hands of a single entity. Instead of twisting the arms of ten different CXOs, your local politician now only needs to twist the arm of a single CXO to knock your entire business of…

Post by Afforess » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 8:31 AM UTC

jcattle wrote: post #88

"The Cloudflare outage was a good thing [...] they're a warning. They can force redundancy and resilience into systems." - he says. On Github.

Post by rkomorn » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 8:45 AM UTC

jcattle wrote: post #96

Afforess wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for doing the meme! https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som... You are very intelligent!

That's fair. However I don't think I would have wrote that if those thoughts were shared on a blogging platform. Most blogging platforms do not qualify as critical infrastructure. GitHub with all its CI/CD and supply chain attacks does. There is a certain particular irony of this being written on critical (centralized) infrastructure without any apparent need. Maybe it was intended, maybe not, in any case I found it…

Post by immibis » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 8:50 AM UTC

Xelbair wrote: post #74

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.

Even more so when most of the internet is also down. What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down? It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.