When Cloudflare Sneezes, the Internet Catches a Cold

Today proved one thing: most of us don’t build software – we duct-tape services together.

On 18th November 2025, a lot of us had the same morning:

• X (Twitter) wasn’t loading.
• ChatGPT was throwing errors.
• Spotify, Canva, gaming platforms, government portals – all shaky or down. Reuters+1

Developers scrambled to check their servers, only to realize: our code was fine.
The problem was further upstream, inside a company most normal users have never heard of: Cloudflare.

This outage was the perfect live demo of an uncomfortable truth:

We don’t really “build” software anymore. We assemble stacks of third-party services, wrap them in code, and hope the duct tape holds.

Let’s unpack what actually happened, and what it says about how we build.

---

So… what went wrong at Cloudflare?

Cloudflare later explained the root cause in a postmortem and public statements:

• They maintain an automatically generated configuration file that helps manage “threat traffic” (bot mitigation / security filtering). The Cloudflare Blog+1
• Over time, this file grew far beyond its expected size.
• A latent bug – a bug that only shows up under specific conditions – existed in the software that reads that file.
• On 18th November, a routine configuration change hit that edge case: the bloated config triggered that bug, causing the traffic-handling service to crash repeatedly. Financial Times+1

Because this service sits in the core path of Cloudflare’s network, the crashes produced:

• HTTP 500 errors
• Timeouts
• Large parts of the web effectively going dark for a few hours The Verge+1

Cloudflare stressed that:

• There’s no evidence of a cyberattack
• It was a software + configuration issue in their own systems ABC+1

In very simple language:

One auto-generated file became too big, hit a hidden bug, crashed a critical service, and because that service sits in front of a huge portion of the internet, the whole world felt it.

---

What is Cloudflare to the average app?

For non-technical readers: Cloudflare is like a traffic cop + bodyguard + highway for your website.

A lot of modern apps use Cloudflare to:

• Speed up content delivery (CDN)
• Protect against attacks (DDoS, WAF)
• Filter bots and suspicious traffic
• Provide DNS and other network plumbing

Roughly one in five websites use Cloudflare in some way. AP News+1

So if your app runs behind Cloudflare and Cloudflare can’t route traffic properly, it doesn’t matter if your code, database, and servers are perfect – users will still see error pages.

That’s exactly what happened.

---

The uncomfortable mirror: we’re shipping duct tape

Look at a typical “modern” SaaS or startup stack:

• DNS / proxy / security: Cloudflare
• Hosting: Vercel, Render, Netlify, AWS, GCP, Azure
• Authentication: Firebase, Auth0, Cognito, “Sign in with Google/Apple”
• Payments: Stripe, PayPal, M-Pesa gateways, Flutterwave, etc.
• Email & notifications: SendGrid, Mailgun, Twilio, WhatsApp APIs
• File storage & media: S3, Cloudinary, Supabase
• Analytics & tracking: 3–10 different scripts and SDKs

Our own code – the part we’re proud of – is often just glue that ties all of this together.

When everything works, that glue feels like a “product”.
When one critical service fails, you suddenly see how much of your app is just duct tape between other people’s systems.

The Cloudflare incident exposed that:

• Tons of products had no plan for “What if Cloudflare is down?”
• For many businesses, Cloudflare might as well be part of their backend, even though they don’t control it.
• Users don’t care if it’s your bug or Cloudflare’s bug; they just see your app as unreliable.

---

Single points of failure are everywhere

Cloudflare isn’t the villain here. Honestly, their engineering team is doing brutally hard work at insane scale – and they published details, owned the mistake, and are rolling out fixes. The Cloudflare Blog+1

The deeper problem is how we architect our systems:

• We centralize huge parts of the internet on a few giants (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, Stripe, etc.).
• We treat them as if they are infallible, and design our products like they’ll never go down.
• We rarely ask, “If this service fails, what can my app still do?”

That’s how a single oversized config file in one company’s infrastructure turned into:

• Broken transit sites
• Broken banking/finance tools
• Broken productivity apps
• Broken AI tools and messaging platforms AP News+1

Not because everyone wrote bad code, but because everyone anchored on the same critical dependency.

---

What “actually building software” would look like

We’re not going back to the 90s and self-hosting everything on bare metal. Using third-party infrastructure is smart and necessary.

But we can change how we depend on it.

Here are some practical shifts that move us from duct tape to engineering:

1. Design for failure, not just success

Ask explicitly:

• “What happens if Cloudflare is down?”
• “What happens if Stripe is down?”
• “What happens if our auth provider is down?”

Then design behaviours like:

• A degraded mode where non-critical features that depend on a broken service are temporarily disabled, not crashing the whole app.
• Clear, friendly error messages that say, “Payments are currently unavailable. You can still do X and Y; we’ll notify you when Z is back.”

2. Keep something static and independent

For many businesses:

• Even when the backend is down, people should at least see:
  • A simple marketing site
  • Contact info
  • A status update

You can:

• Host a status page or a minimal static site on a different provider or even a separate domain.
• Use that to communicate during incidents: what’s down, what still works, and rough timelines.

3. Use timeouts, not blind trust

When we integrate APIs, we often code like this:

“Call service. Wait forever. If it fails, crash the whole page.”

Instead:

• Set sensible timeouts for each external call.
• Use circuit breakers: if a service is failing repeatedly, automatically stop calling it for a while and show a fallback.

This is boring work. It doesn’t show up nicely in screenshots. But when things break, it’s the difference between:

• “Everything is dead” vs
• “Some features are temporarily limited, but you can still use most of the app.”

4. Map your dependencies

Sit with your team and draw a very honest diagram:

• Core app
• Every external service: DNS, CDN, auth, payments, email, logging, analytics, etc.
• For each, ask:
  • If this fails totally, what breaks?
  • What can we keep working?
  • How do we tell users what’s going on?

Even this basic exercise can reshape your roadmap.

---

So what should we take away from this?

The Cloudflare outage wasn’t just “someone else’s bug”.
It was a mirror.

It showed us:

• How dependent we are on a handful of infrastructure providers
• How thin our own “software” sometimes is, once you subtract all the external services
• How few of us design for the day the duct tape peels off

We’re still going to use Cloudflare. And Stripe. And Firebase. And everything else. That’s fine.

But maybe, after this, we’ll:

• Build just a bit more resilience into our systems
• Think a bit more about failure modes
• Spend one sprint not shipping yet another feature, but hardening the foundations

Because yesterday proved one thing very clearly:

Most of us don’t really build the internet.
We stitch it together. The least we can do is make sure the stitching doesn’t explode the moment one thread snaps.