Did Cloudflare just bring down half of the Internet?

most mortem is here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

it was not a ddos.

In short: yes, because Cloudflare is the man in the middle between you and half the internet, most pages use it's service.

is this another ai whoopsie

I have experienced Cloudstrike firsthand. I was stuck in an airport.

Weirdly, I haven’t noticed or been impacted by it at all 😆

Seems like it.

Reminds me of the Cloudflare incident this year.

And the Cloudflare incident also this year.

Clownflare is going just great.
- 🔥 Everything is fine 🔥
Reminds me of the Cloudflare incident this year.
And the Cloudflare incident also this year.
Were those as big as this one? Somehow I missed them.
- I'm learning about this one right now, so I guess I basically missed this one, too, while being online for hours...

Use cloud services, they said. To prevent outages, they said.

@tux0r@feddit.org when cloudflare catch a cold, it's half the web that is coughing...
and people called me crazy when i said it was a big fat SPOF...
There are a lot of IT departments though that get to throw up their hands and say “can’t fix it, it’s a cloud issue!” and watch as management, who pushed for cloud in the first place, sucks it up because they don’t want to lose face for their decision.
(Yes I know some still get yelled at regardless and told to fix a 3rd party service)
- (Yes I know some still get yelled at regardless and told to fix a 3rd party service)
  Man I feel this. Once some drunk asshat hit a telephone pole and it killed the fiber line to a call center for the company I worked for. Hilariously the backup Internet was on the same pole... Additionally.. It was a hemispherical call center meaning it served everyone in the western hemisphere.
  Anyway.. All internet was down for the call center for like 8 hours. So no calls were being answered. No orders being placed etc.
  Being on the Helpdesk at the time..I took so many "our Internet is down" calls. Which after a couple hours it turned into "fix the internet or I'm calling your boss" lol
  Which then turned into "fix the internet or I'm calling their boss"
  From my pov it was hilarious.
  Someone in upper management got fired for consolidating all the call centers. Then they moved to wireless Internet via cell towers as a backup.
  But as we all know. That's just fiber based at the tower. Lol
  So yeah fun times of "go do someone else's job"
  Still to this day idk why it took so long.. you'd think an sla would be in place. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯
It'll be fun, they said.
- Your cat won't die, they said.
"trust is" says marketing.

The world's richest man can't even keep his own website up and accessible. But the guys hosting the fedi in their garage are just fine. Lol

tbf, the scales are slightly different
- He should be able to afford a lot more redundancy than our garage hosters.
  The scale makes it more embarrassing, not less.
- I mean, isn't that part of the point? Decentralization to smaller systems
Can I rent some space in your garage?
Lemmy.ca was down

Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn't reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn't even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it's another global outage.

In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.

Well yeah. Yourrouter is managed by a person. We aren't as good at fucking up as mega corps.
- I mean, sure, I do understand what's happening on a logical level. I'm just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
  It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.
  But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the "perfect market" that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn't actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
  In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don't have a functioning "world government" that could enforce competition at that level via laws.
  So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.
To be fair, it’s never DNS ;]
- To be fair, it’s never DNS ;]
  Sometimes it's BGP.

Are they vibe-coding or something?

There's some malicious satisfaction watching centralized internet burning in dumpster fire while your self hosted stuff is still up

Except many of us use cloudflare tunnels to reach our selfhosted kit from the internet because we're behind CGNATs...
hell yea

Never replace your code monkeys with clankers, boys.

Yes. All my fedi services are still happy tho :)

Most Lemmy images stopped working. And maybe what my server is showing me in terms of posts is just what it still has stored.
Edit: My server is actually much more responsive with most of the big Lemmy instances being down. I really hope 1.0 brings great improvements.
Piefed.ca is was down because of it :( Edit: it's back online!

maybe if big tech stopped firing all their engineers and investing in ai, this could have been prevented.

No, sorry. Shareholder value. Gotta keep the bubble inflating.

Cloudflare is increasingly a SPOF for the web

It's hilariously probably at the point where it's beneficial for them from a PR perspective to recommend alternatives to new customers now

They are half the internet.

The age old question: was it DNS or LLM?

Gonna be a run day at work today

Again?

Damn, I really shouldn't have trusted cloudflare tunnel. All my selfhosted servers are inaccessible... It's running behind traefik so no ports are open.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.
- Do you have VPS recommendations? I searched for a bit on Lemmy and found out Vultr might not be a good option (they sell your data).

Weird. Didn't notice because Cloudflare blocks my real user traffic because I have the audacity to use a VPN and Firefox with privacy extensions that block like maybe two of their arsenal of fingerprinting tools.

It's so funny :P just months ago one of my most used forums adopted cloudflare and many asked "Are you sure?". Well...

i'm usually on frontends, alternatives and self-hosted services. i'm barely seeing any of those outages.

feeling cool rn ngl 😎

Anyone have a decent guide on migrating from CF tunnels over to a proper reverse proxy? I hate networking 😓

Check out traefik, not sure how easy or the process to switch but configuring it is relatively easy
- I'm not sure this is what I'm looking for, I appreciate it though!
  I'm hoping for something where the only thing I need to have on someone elses system is DNS entries, ideally.
  I know I can use duckdns to automatically update my dns entries when my public IP expires (residential conn), and I know how to handle setting up DNS entries themselves(I hate dns 😓) but I'm just not sure how to configure nginx or apache. As it stands the only "get this thing on the web" tool I'm actually proficient with is streamlit, which I can't use with my selfhosted tools.

Canva is affected.

Lemmy works so let the world just burn down. oh also chatgpt does not work hurraayyy

Lemmy.world was affected too, how come? ಠ_ಠ

Because .world definitely uses Cloudflare? https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=lemmy.world
- ooo thats a cool website. Just for the funnies I just threw the top 35 (as shown by fediverse observer) into it.
the silver lining to this cloud. lol

Can't say I noticed anything tbh

Lots of small sites were down. Including lemmy.zip
Maybe it's regional

All my services are fine. I self host. Yes I'm quite pedantic about it. :D

I also self host, but I can't claim to have better uptime than Cloudflare
- I don't know how many 9s I do ... but I don't care. We should not think of metrics of uptime or scalability like BigTech, we're not them. We're not "selling" the same "product". To me it's about agency, empowerment, creativity, privacy, not uptime.

Yes and they keep doing this every other week it feels like.

I don't know what's gone wrong but they need to get real people making their code again (I'm assuming they have taken the leash off cursor in all their repos, because it feels like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

Seriously, please stop taking down the internet.

And second seriously we need a new alien age technology that can stop us having to route all of our traffic through one service.

Annoying pretty much