Cloudflare suffered losses major disruption on November 18, and it took over several major platforms. OpenAI, Spotify, X, and Canva were among some of the websites and services that were shut down on Tuesday morning.
Feel like you’re experiencing déjà vu? Well, you’re not.
The recent Cloudflare outage should not be confused with the recent Microsoft Azure outage, which resulted in the shutdown of Xbox, Minecraft, and other platforms. And don’t forget the other big event which happened in OctoberWhen Amazon, Reddit, Snapchat and other big platforms went offline due to problems with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is also a far cry from the June outage, when Google Cloud Platform (GCP) And Cloudflare took down much of the internet
Okay, so the internet’s biggest websites and platforms have been going down a lot lately. What’s going on over here?
Why do so many websites shut down at the same time?
Those big social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and gaming networks are all using some of the same major service providers to host and distribute their content, with Cloudflare being one of them.
Cloudflare is one of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs), which is a system that manages web traffic. When Cloudflare is functioning normally, it manages web traffic and protects the platform from attacks.
“CDNs are distributed infrastructures that accelerate content delivery and enhance user experience by caching and serving web content closer to users,” explained angelique medinato Mashable, head of Internet intelligence at network intelligence company Cisco ThousandEyes. “They essentially serve as ‘front doors’ to websites and applications, where users connect to Cloudflare’s servers rather than their own clients.”
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“When this ‘front door’ becomes unavailable, users lose entry points into multiple sites and applications,” Medina said. “Given the large number of customers and sites they serve, any meaningful disruption in their ability to deliver content could effectively render large portions of the Internet inaccessible to users.”
Basically, the Internet has become consolidated and we are all taking advantage of that consolidation.
“This is not just another technological blip,” said CEO Ramute Vernelite. ipxoIn a statement to Mashable, a leading IP resource management platform in Europe. “This is further evidence of how exposed [the] The digital economy is suffering due to various breakdowns in a few digital infrastructure service providers.”
Are internet outages becoming more frequent?
In the early days of the Internet, there were countless web hosting providers, and many companies also ran their own dedicated servers. Now, companies big and small are all using the same cloud service providers, whether it is AWS, GCP, or Azure. Cloudflare makes the Internet even more vulnerable to disruption, as the company has no direct competitors.
“This incident emphasizes the inherent danger of making the entire Internet infrastructure dependent on a few service providers,” Vernelite said.
But, is this the point? And are these services really being reduced more than usual? According to Cisco ThousandEyes, which track outage And map themThis is correct. Web downtime isn’t really any more than normal, even if it is seem that way.
Medina shared, “Cisco ThousandEyes has not seen an increase in the frequency of service outages across cloud and other Internet infrastructure providers; however, the number of sites and applications relying on these services has increased.” “Because these services are increasingly becoming an issue of centralization – a small number of companies are controlling large parts of the Internet – if something goes wrong, it could lead to the disruption of many sites and applications around the world.”
In short, the number of disruptions is not increasing. Rather, the shocks of individual events are becoming larger.