You know back in my day websites would protect themselves, as was the style at the time.

Now a days they just get cloudflare and put up a cookie notice.

Just one of those things lazy devs do.

I remember experts saying 5 or 10 years ago that the increased standardization and centralization of the internet would lead to more frequent and widespread internet blackouts.

First AWS, and now this. It looks like they're right.

It just means the internet is built on a very flimsy stack of technologies and any of them failing causes huge downstream issues. We saw that with AWS, and now with Cloudflare.

It's only concerning if there are no alternatives, but as it stands there are other companies that all of these websites could have done a failover to when both AWS or Cloudflare went down. But they decided that their websites having a single point of failure was worth the risk over paying for having a proper backup system ready to go.

I mean, the entire internet is owned by a few corporations. everything from the infrastructure to the entire DNS system is owned and controlled by corporations. in the case of DNS, it's even an american corporation, that so far has kept its hands off of things and supposedly has not been interfered with by the US government.

The service providers get 100% of their money all the same.

This causes endless amounts of laziness on their side, and quality goes to hell.

We are causing this laziness.

Unless we, their clients, hold them accountable, and make them feel the impact of their faults in their pockets, things will continue to get worse and worse.

Most corporate IT hires fucking morons as admins :(

Yes, the increasing centralization of the internet is concerning, and the fact that companies have been vibecoding stuff increases the chances of stuff going wrong. And quality control and testing aren't a priority anymore, it's as if they're just chasing short term profits. Oh wait, they are.

Imma switch my services to Bunny CDN to decrease my reliance on a huge service. And its Slovenian, so that's pretty nice.

.

Edit - cloudflare now says it was a misconfigured config, not a DOS attack as they initially reported

I mean... not only is it not very concerning, I barely noticed. If not for news about it here on fediverse, I might not have known. I guess I dont visit the corpo internet all that much.

It even took down the very instance we're posting this on.

I barely noticed

I didn't even notice that it went down.

it's very concerning, but what are the alternatives?

The snark of the following comment is not directed towards you, OP, but at the tech industry at large.

What I don't understand is why people are still surprised when this shit happens. Today, cloudflare takes down half the internet, last month it was AWS. Crowdstrike did it last year even more severely. Akamai has also caused major issues like this before, as has Google. M365/azure outages barely get reported on because they are so frequent. Yet, they are all still being used to hold up most of our infrastructure. Every single company I've done IT for has used at least one of these companies for critical infrastructure. There just aren't any other realistic options due to the refusal of non IT people to learn about IT.

If you try to use something other than one of the big companies, you're hit with one or more roadblocks.

1. You "don't have the budget" to selfhost. Bean counters would rather pay $100 a month indefinitely than $5k to buy new hardware that will save $1000 a month for years.

2. No approval for non giant corpo option, because using AWS is cheaper and has brand recognition. This is due to the same economics and myopia that caused Walmart to be one of the only places you can get groceries.

3. There is no other option. Every year that goes by, more small companies get gobbled up by big tech M&A. Unless your company opts to create its own implementation of a service/software, you're stuck with one of only a few options, even if you could get the approval to use something not run on big tech.

4. Even if you manage to jump all of the previous hurdles, the Internet connected software you're using probably relies on big tech infrastructure too. Every company has to navigate all of these hurdles for every saas/infrastructure implementation, and the only ones that successfully do it have to have leadership that not only understands why the decisions have to be made, but also need to be willing to accept the extra cost. Anyone that has dealt with upper management knows that this is exceptionally rare.

So what we are left with is a system that every professional knows is deeply broken and monopolized. The people that actually make the final decisions are largely ignorant and unwilling to invest money in fixing it, instead choosing short term savings and lack of commitment over long term security and continuity.

How does one company have that much impact?

Because they are a very good CDN and provide excellent DDos protection. They then expanded to do a whole host of other things, to the point where they do pretty much everything. Basically, they have become the first name most folks think of when they want to put something on the internet. A one stop shop for your web hosting needs. Wouldn't surprise me to learn they rent servers and VPS's as well.

Been seeing it in the selfhosting communities and subreddits for a while now. "Oh I want to put this selfhosted service on the internet. I should put it behind Cloudflare!" Most of the time it's not needed in that context.

Do you think that's concerning?

Well, they did just take out "half" of the internet today so.... In general, if it seems like "everyone" is using a single service, it's probably a good idea to see if an alternative exists and will suit your needs. Which reminds me, I should probably start looking for a replacement for Tailscale. They're starting to look a bit like Cloudflare to me, in the sense that "everyone", including myself tends to recommend them as a VPN.