If you tried to access a major website yesterday (December 5) or back on November 18, you likely hit a wall. Maybe it was a "500 Internal Server Error," or maybe the page just spun forever. You weren't alone.
The culprit in both cases was Cloudflare, a company that sits in front of about 20% of the entire internet. When they sneeze, the world catches a cold.
At Arcscribe, we rely on infrastructure like Cloudflare to keep our clients' sites fast and secure. But these recent outages raise a massive question that every business owner (and developer) needs to ask: Have we made the web too centralized?
The Anatomy of the Crash
To understand the solution, we have to understand the problem. These weren't cyber attacks; they were "own goals."
The November 18 Outage: The "Zombie" File
The first blackout was caused by a bug in Cloudflare's Bot Management system. Essentially, they pushed a code update that caused a specific configuration file to generate duplicate rows. This file became massive, too big for the system to handle.
It’s a classic overflow error. The servers tried to read the file, choked, and crashed. Because this file is pushed globally to fight bots, the crash happened everywhere at once.
The December 5 Outage: The WAF Update
Yesterday's outage was different. Cloudflare was trying to patch a security vulnerability in "React Server Components" (a framework many modern sites use). They updated their Web Application Firewall (WAF) to inspect traffic more deeply.
The problem? The update clashed with their older "FL1" proxy architecture. The system that was supposed to protect websites ended up blocking them entirely, returning 500 errors to legitimate users.
The "Too Big to Fail" Paradox
So, why do we (and millions of other developers) still use Cloudflare? Why not just host everything directly?
1. The Shield Necessity
If we took your website off Cloudflare today, you would be exposed to the raw internet. Bots, scrapers, and DDoS attackers constantly hammer public IP addresses. Cloudflare acts as a bouncer. Without them, we would have to build our own bouncer, which is expensive and hard to maintain.
2. Speed (The CDN Factor)
Cloudflare stores copies of your website's images and code in data centers across 300+ cities. If a customer in London visits your site, they download the data from London, not from a server in the US. This physical proximity is why the modern web feels fast.
The Danger of Centralization
The trade off for this speed and security is dependency. We have moved from a decentralized web (where everyone hosted their own stuff) to a centralized one.
When Amazon (AWS), Google Cloud, or Cloudflare has a bad day, we all have a bad day. As developers, this frustrates us. We can write perfect code for your website, but if the "pipes" of the internet burst, your site still goes down.
How Arcscribe Mitigates the Risk
We cannot control Cloudflare. But we can build "earthquake-resistant" architecture.
1. "Fail-Open" Strategies
Where possible, we configure non-critical services to "fail open." This means if the security check fails (like the Bot Management bug), the site should try to load anyway rather than showing an error page. It is a riskier mode, but it keeps the lights on during an outage.
2. Static Resilience
Because we build static sites (not database-driven WordPress sites), your website is just simple files. During some types of outages, we can bypass the complex processing layers and just serve the raw HTML. It might be slower, but it works.
3. The "Backup Generator" (DNS)
For our enterprise clients, we explore Multi-Vendor DNS. This is like having two internet connections. If Cloudflare's phone book goes down, the traffic automatically switches to another provider. It is overkill for a local bakery, but essential for a mission-critical app.
The Reality Check
The lesson from December 5 isn't "Cloudflare is bad." It is that 100% uptime is a myth.
The internet is a living, breathing machine made of millions of cables and servers. Sometimes, it breaks. Our job at Arcscribe isn't to promise you that the internet will never break. Our job is to ensure that when it does, your business is the first one back online.
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