You’re over-focusing on the analogy.
It’s just one sentence meant to illustrate the difference between two Cloudflare services for people who don’t follow the technical details closely.
If you got the point already, great. Others didn’t, and that’s who the analogy was for.
No need to turn it into a whole crusade.
The post wasn’t “about DNS” as a protocol.
It was about the fact that Cloudflare sits in front of so much of the internet that even issues near the DNS layer create DNS-visible symptoms across thousands of services.
That’s why the example works.
When a single provider is so deeply embedded that people instinctively check their DNS first and entire regions of the web become unreachable, that’s not a messaging error.
It’s the whole point.
If the distinction between “the DNS module worked” and “the internet behaved as if Cloudflare’s DNS was down” becomes the hill to die on, that says more about the fragility of the architecture than about the wording of the post.
The point isn’t that Cloudflare’s DNS literally failed.
The point is that a disruption in one layer of Cloudflare’s stack was enough to break a huge chunk of the web.
That’s exactly the problem.
When a single company’s infrastructure is woven so deeply into routing, protection, CDN, DNS, and edge services, even a non-DNS fault can create DNS-level consequences downstream.
If the internet behaves as if Cloudflare is the DNS for half the web, then the architecture—not the specific failing module—is the issue.
Not really.
I’m calling it what it actually was: a single-point-of-failure event that exposed how dependent the modern web is on one company’s infrastructure.
Whether we call it an “outage,” “incident,” or “hiccup” doesn’t change the fact that thousands of unrelated services broke simply because one upstream provider had a bad moment.
If a small naming disruption can cascade through half the internet, the terminology isn’t the issue.
The architecture is.
Not exactly.
Cloudflare’s DNS resolver responded, but the outage still broke the availability path for huge portions of the web.
When a single provider sits in front of:
• DNS resolution
• CDN routing
• TLS termination
• DDoS filtering
…then even if their DNS cluster survives, the dependency chain behind it doesn’t.
The problem isn’t “Cloudflare DNS failed.”
The problem is “the modern web is built in a way where one company having a bad minute takes thousands of unrelated sites down.”
You’re over-focusing on the analogy. It’s just one sentence meant to illustrate the difference between two Cloudflare services for people who don’t follow the technical details closely. If you got the point already, great. Others didn’t, and that’s who the analogy was for. No need to turn it into a whole crusade.