Earlier today, November 18th, one of the Internet’s most important providers, Cloudflare, went down in multiple regions.
Cloudflare is almost single handedly responsible for enabling today’s small businesses to stay online despite denial-of-service attacks, bot swarms, scrapers, injectors and other bad actors. Even their free tier provides the kind of network flood protection that you simply could not buy at any price just five years ago.
Their Cloud Delivery Network (CDN) caches your content across the world, reducing latency and speeding up websites. Cloudflare optimizes your images and scripts and moves them closer to your users.
Their Workers platform means you don’t have to maintain fleets of servers for simple tasks.
The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects your application from SQL injections, cross-site scripting attacks and malware. It stops attacks before they can exploit your slightly out of date application.
And sometimes (very rarely) they do go down, as they did today. When it happens, it impacts a lot of people. And there are many upset customers, much gnashing of teeth, and frankly understandably so.
But remember that they do a lot. And no, there’s no easy way to achieve cross provider redundancy. Everything is possible at some cost, but given the general reliability of Cloudflare, the complexity and expense simply are not worth it.
Other equally important providers have had outages too:
– Fastly: November 12, 2025
– Akamai: November 4, 2025
– Amazon Web Services: October 20, 2025
– Microsoft Azure: October 29, 2025
– Oracle Cloud: May 19, 2025
It’s our opinion that Cloudflare is critical to how the Internet operates, and we will continue to recommend them, given their unmatched overall reliability.
