4 ms·

turns out having a central failure point for the entire web was a bad idea

noobermin 4y ago
Someone should a website that collates the approx. 90M times this sentiment has been made on this website (a good chunk of me making it) just a reminder how nothing somehow changes on this front the moment it comes back up and people go back to relying on single SAAS's for everything.
- donkarma 4y ago
  I wonder how long Cloudflare would have to be down for to have a noticeable change
  - refulgentis 4y ago
    14h53m
  - saurik 4y ago
    I remember when some key part of AWS EC2--EBS in us-east-1 maybe?--was down for a few days straight. Honestly, the main thing it taught me was "if you are honest with your customers they will mostly just come back later and buy everything they didn't buy today".
- selcuka 4y ago
  To be fair this is not relying on a single SaaS for everything but many people relying on a single SaaS. I mean if you want to use a reverse proxy/CDN, you must rely on someone.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Yes, sorry my rant was more like "everything relies on a single SaaS" rather than the SaaS doing everything, just mixed up the phrasing
  - iso1631 4y ago
    My company uses 3 CDNs, although not cloudflare. If one (say Aakami) goes down it gets removed from the pool and life continues.
    - inferiorhuman 4y ago
      Well that makes your company more responsible than my credit union.
      - iso1631 4y ago
        Our key customer facing services are a 99.995% uptime (and a total of 2 or fewer incidents per year of "any length"), which means once you start concatenating services with 99.995% SLAs you aren't there. How that SLA measures a 2 second outage for some customers is a separate thing, and sort of shows how meaningless these things can be on the internet (if you lose service for 10% of your potential customers is that an outage? How about 90%? How do you know how many were lost).
        inferiorhuman 4y ago
        Measuring outages doesn't seem so meaningless as long as you money seems inaccessible. Their main site went down for about 20 hours a couple weeks ago because their hosting provider went down. They deployed an HTTPS only static site in its stead, so at first blush it looked like they deployed nothing. Great when you're trying to find contact information hosted on that site. Their online banking site leveraged Cloudflare, so obviously they just rode that outage out with no notifications, etc.
        iso1631 4y ago
        Sure but that's a total outage for a long time. What if for some reason a single /24 was unreachable from the site (say an errant route for 12.85.25.0/24 somehow got in the path). How would you even know that was a problem - how many customers are on that /24, how would I measure their failed attempts to connect? I have a remote office in India on Tata. The other day it had access to much of the internet, but due to a fibre break in the Mederteranian it didn't have access to end points in Europe for a good 20 seconds. However the other link on a different ISP remained working at that time. Does that count as an outage? If I wasn't actively monitoring that link with a high resolution would I even know about it?
ummonk 4y ago
It's not a central failure point though. Plenty of websites don't use Cloudflare.
- mobiuscog 4y ago
  If most of the websites, that most people rely on for their day-to-day functionality, use Cloudflare, it's effectively a central point of failure. Sure, there are alternatives and not everything uses it, but if it's enough to greatly affect a large proportion of internet users, it's a problem. Just like if google mail went away for ever. There are plenty of other email providers, right ?
swarnie 4y ago
Similar to when Facebook/Whatsapp went down earlier in the year and we all reverted back to SMS for an evening. Fun times.
Gigachad 4y ago
I wonder if it really was though. I’d think that these centralised services go down less than the self hosted stuff previously. Is it better to have more overall uptime but downtime means everything stops, or random downtimes of individual sites that adds up to more downtime.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  I mean if large websites like Notion or Medium had used IPFS instead, there would be no central point of failure, and web pages would still be available from distributed hosts
ab-dm 4y ago
Yes and no. Obviously not great when everything goes down, but I find a strange sense of solace and calm when I know there’s a lot of people in the same boat and there’s little I can do but wait.
- prashantsengar 4y ago
  Yeah same lol. I saw that my SaaS services were not working and I got stressed thinking why all my EC2 instances went down at the same time. I checked down detector for EC2 and it reported that Cloudflare is down. I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that the (almost) whole of internet is down - nothing that I can do here.
takeda 4y ago
It's quite ironic that the Internet was designated to withstand nuclear attack, yet with how much everyone started using "cloud" a stupid configuration mistake in an important company can put it on its knees. We should really rethink that constant reliance on single point of failure.

Someone should a website that collates the approx. 90M times this sentiment has been made on this website (a good chunk of me making it) just a reminder how nothing somehow changes on this front the moment it comes back up and people go back to relying on single SAAS's for everything.

donkarma 4y ago
I wonder how long Cloudflare would have to be down for to have a noticeable change
- refulgentis 4y ago
  14h53m
- saurik 4y ago
  I remember when some key part of AWS EC2--EBS in us-east-1 maybe?--was down for a few days straight. Honestly, the main thing it taught me was "if you are honest with your customers they will mostly just come back later and buy everything they didn't buy today".
selcuka 4y ago
To be fair this is not relying on a single SaaS for everything but many people relying on a single SaaS. I mean if you want to use a reverse proxy/CDN, you must rely on someone.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Yes, sorry my rant was more like "everything relies on a single SaaS" rather than the SaaS doing everything, just mixed up the phrasing
- iso1631 4y ago
  My company uses 3 CDNs, although not cloudflare. If one (say Aakami) goes down it gets removed from the pool and life continues.
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    Well that makes your company more responsible than my credit union.
    - iso1631 4y ago
      Our key customer facing services are a 99.995% uptime (and a total of 2 or fewer incidents per year of "any length"), which means once you start concatenating services with 99.995% SLAs you aren't there. How that SLA measures a 2 second outage for some customers is a separate thing, and sort of shows how meaningless these things can be on the internet (if you lose service for 10% of your potential customers is that an outage? How about 90%? How do you know how many were lost).
      - inferiorhuman 4y ago
        Measuring outages doesn't seem so meaningless as long as you money seems inaccessible. Their main site went down for about 20 hours a couple weeks ago because their hosting provider went down. They deployed an HTTPS only static site in its stead, so at first blush it looked like they deployed nothing. Great when you're trying to find contact information hosted on that site. Their online banking site leveraged Cloudflare, so obviously they just rode that outage out with no notifications, etc.
        iso1631 4y ago
        Sure but that's a total outage for a long time. What if for some reason a single /24 was unreachable from the site (say an errant route for 12.85.25.0/24 somehow got in the path). How would you even know that was a problem - how many customers are on that /24, how would I measure their failed attempts to connect? I have a remote office in India on Tata. The other day it had access to much of the internet, but due to a fibre break in the Mederteranian it didn't have access to end points in Europe for a good 20 seconds. However the other link on a different ISP remained working at that time. Does that count as an outage? If I wasn't actively monitoring that link with a high resolution would I even know about it?

ummonk 4y ago

It's not a central failure point though. Plenty of websites don't use Cloudflare.

mobiuscog 4y ago
If most of the websites, that most people rely on for their day-to-day functionality, use Cloudflare, it's effectively a central point of failure. Sure, there are alternatives and not everything uses it, but if it's enough to greatly affect a large proportion of internet users, it's a problem. Just like if google mail went away for ever. There are plenty of other email providers, right ?

swarnie 4y ago

Similar to when Facebook/Whatsapp went down earlier in the year and we all reverted back to SMS for an evening. Fun times.

Gigachad 4y ago

I wonder if it really was though. I’d think that these centralised services go down less than the self hosted stuff previously. Is it better to have more overall uptime but downtime means everything stops, or random downtimes of individual sites that adds up to more downtime.

woojoo666 4y ago
I mean if large websites like Notion or Medium had used IPFS instead, there would be no central point of failure, and web pages would still be available from distributed hosts

ab-dm 4y ago

Yes and no. Obviously not great when everything goes down, but I find a strange sense of solace and calm when I know there’s a lot of people in the same boat and there’s little I can do but wait.

prashantsengar 4y ago
Yeah same lol. I saw that my SaaS services were not working and I got stressed thinking why all my EC2 instances went down at the same time. I checked down detector for EC2 and it reported that Cloudflare is down. I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that the (almost) whole of internet is down - nothing that I can do here.

takeda 4y ago

It's quite ironic that the Internet was designated to withstand nuclear attack, yet with how much everyone started using "cloud" a stupid configuration mistake in an important company can put it on its knees. We should really rethink that constant reliance on single point of failure.