A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
They protected the endpoints. They just weren’t able to route traffic to them. Id bet it takes a MUCH larger ddos to bring cloudflare to its knees vs your average website.
From a Cloudflare customer’s point of view, I don’t care if my site is down from a DDOS or a Cloudflare outage, but the latter seems to happen more often.
As it stands? Cloudflare is still incredibly effective at protecting customers from those DDOS attacks. Which, depending on your hosting solution, can mean very noticeable monetary savings because YOUR hardware/connection didn’t spike. And, regardless, can mean noticeable monetary savings as your engineers didn’t need to recover a crashed system because your setup was just sitting there idle.
That said: If you truly need high availability? You need to do what downdetector did and have alternatives ready in the event that Cloudflare falls over. Same as with your ISP… which should be ISPs plural.
From another cloudflare customer, if our sites still work internally it’s marginally better than them being broken both inside and outside the org as they would be if they were ddosed directly. I guess it depends on what kind of services you’re running.
Yeah, but just one “unusual spike in traffic” - so it seems. /s