Cloudflare went down again this morning, reporting ‘internal service degradation’ that impacted countless websites and platforms including, in an ultimate irony, Downdetector itself briefly.
Following a major outage last month, experts said this once again highlights how dangerously leveraged the global economy is on a small number of companies, as Cloudflare is often referred to as the backbone of the entire internet.
Cloudflare provides a global network of services designed to make internet websites and applications faster and more secure. But in recent weeks it appears to be doing anything but.
Another month, another meltdown
Rohit Parmar-Mistry, Founder at Burton-on-Trent-based Pattrn Data, was withering about the latest outage.
He said: “Another month and we have another internet meltdown. But we shouldn’t really be surprised when these black-box behemoths have glitches and take half the digital world down with them.
“The key danger here is that we’ve consolidated the internet’s backbone into the hands of three or four players.
“After all, when Cloudflare sneezes, the entire global economy catches a cold and the bottom line of everyday businesses can really suffer.
Why use Cloudflare?
Colette Mason, Author & AI Consultant at London-based Clever Clogs AI, explained why companies continue to use Cloudflare despite recent outages.
She said: “If you’re wondering why companies continue to use Cloudflare when it keeps going down, the first reason is speed. Cloudflare stores copies of websites on servers in hundreds of cities globally, so a user in Tokyo loads content from Tokyo, not London, significantly collapsing load times.
“The other reasons are security, as it blocks hackers or bots from websites before they can even knock on the door, and cost, as it filters out junk traffic and compresses data, meaning companies pay significantly less for bandwidth and server power.
“But, as we’ve seen again today, when Cloudflare stumbles, the ripple effect can be immediate and real and exposes how dangerously leveraged the global economy is.
“Instead of a fast, secure site, the world is greeted by a wall of ‘500 Internal Server Error’ and ‘503 Service Unavailable’ messages, instantly locking customers out and bringing businesses around the world to a grinding halt.”
Photo by José Ramos on Unsplash
