A shark is an extremely energy efficient creature, but it is relatively stupid.

And centralization is ineffective long term

> if Cloudflare is down no one will blame you since the internet is down.

That is true. it is also the problem. It means the biggest providers do not even need to bother to be reliable because everyone will use them anyway.

"Accountability Sinks"

https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

> if Cloudflare is down no one will blame you since the internet is down.

But this is not really the case. When Azure/AWS were down, same as this one with Cloudflare: significant amount of web was down but most of it was not. It just makes more obvious which provider you use.

> Setting up a replica and then pointing your api requests at it when cloudflare request fails is trivial.

Only if you're doing very basic proxy stuff. If you stack multiple features and maybe even start using workers, there may be no 1:1 alternatives to switch to. And definitely not trivially.

Two domains for your api perhaps, a full blown SPA could try one and then the other.

Owning your IP space and using Anycast.

You have the power to not host your own infrastructure on aws and behind cloudflare, or in the case of an employer you have the power to fight against the voices arguing for the unsustainable status quo.

The HN crowd in particular absolutely has a say in this, given the amount of engineering leads, managers, and even just regular programmers/admins/etc that frequent here - all of whom contribute to making these decisions.

Well I can't change my NS since it's on Cloudflare too but besides that my personal opinion was not about this outage in particular but more the default approach of some websites that don't need all this tech (yes I really was out of groceries)

It's the web-scrapers. I run a tiny little mom and pop website, and the bots were consistently using up all of my servers' resources. Cloudfare more or less instantly resolved it.

I’ve been DDoS’d countless times running a small scale, uncontroversial SaaS. Without them I would’ve had countless downtime periods with really no other way to mitigate.

There's plenty of DDoS if you're dealing with people petty enough.

The VPS I use will nuke your instance if you run a game server. Not due to resource usage, but because it attracts DDoS like nothing else. Ban a teen for being an asshole and expect your service to be down for a week. And there isn't really Cloudflare for independent game servers. There's Steam Networking but it requires the developer to support it and of course Steam.

Valve's GDC talk about DDoS mitigation for games: https://youtu.be/2CQ1sxPppV4

It actually is.

I run a small video game forum with posts going back to 2008. We got absolutely smashed by bots scraping for training data for LLMs.

So I put it behind Cloudflare and now it's down. Ho hum.

I was arrested by Interpol in 2018 because of warrants issued by the NCA, DOJ, FBI, J-CAT, and several other agencies, all due to my involvement in running a DDoS-for-hire website. Honestly, anyone can bypass Cloudflare, and anyone that want to take your website down - will take it down. It's just that luckily for all of us most of the DDoS-4-hire websites are down nowadays but there are still many botnets out there that will get past basically any protection and you can get access to them for basically $5.

There are plenty of alternatives to protect against DDoSing, people like convenience though. “Nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft/Cloudflare”. We have a culture problem

Good chance the reason DDOSing isn't so big anymore is because everyone is on Cloudflare.

DDOSing is absolutely so rampant that you need to be behind something.

Cloudflare DDOS protection is super essential (especially for smaller businesses)

Honestly it kinda is. Ai bots scrape everything now, social media means you can go viral suddenly, or you make a post that angers someone and they launch an attack just because. I default to cloudflare, because like an umbrella I might just be carrying it around most of the time, but in the case of a sudden downpoor it's better than getting wet.

It's not super common, but common enough that I don't want to deal with it.

The other part is just how convenient it is with CF. Easy to configure, plenty of power and cheap compared to the other big ones. If they made their dashboard and permission-system better (no easy way to tell what a token can do last I checked), I'd be even more of a fan.

If Germany's Telekom was forced to peer on DE-CIX, I'd always use CF. Since they aren't and CF doesn't pay for peering, it's a hard choice for Germany but an easy one everywhere else.