Cloudflare outage on June 21, 2022 (blog.cloudflare.com)

Article summary

Cloudflare experienced an outage on June 21, 2022, affecting 19 data centers and impacting 50% of total requests. The outage was caused by a change to the network configuration, which was part of a project to increase resilience in busy locations. The issue was resolved within an hour, with the last data center coming back online at 07:42 UTC. Cloudflare published a post-mortem of the incident, detailing the cause and response to the outage.

Main themes

• Cloudflare outage
• Post-mortem analysis
• Transparency and trust
• Incident response
• Centralization and recentralization
• Company culture and values

What commenters say

• Publishing post-mortems quickly and transparently builds trust and confidence in a company's ability to respond to incidents.
• Some companies may not publish post-mortems due to fear of highlighting deficiencies or losing customers.
• Transparency is key to building trust, especially for companies that provide critical services like Cloudflare.
• The speed of publishing a post-mortem can be a double-edged sword, as it may lead to incomplete investigations or rushed conclusions.
• Cloudflare's business model relies on being fast and available, making transparency and rapid response crucial to their success.
• Some argue that Cloudflare's centralization of web traffic and DNS queries could be harmful and contribute to recentralization of the web.
• Others disagree, seeing Cloudflare as a necessary service that provides protection and freedom to host websites anywhere.
• The decision to publish post-mortems publicly may not be suitable for all companies, and some may prefer to handle incidents internally or through paid support channels.