I always love it when some massive piece of web infrastructure goes down but most websites I use are self-hosted so the only real effect is I see lots of news stories that cloudflare is down.
I always love it when some massive piece of web infrastructure goes down but most websites I use are self-hosted so the only real effect is I see lots of news stories that cloudflare is down.
Is there any meta analysis on these major outages?
They seem to be occuring more and more regularly.
It would be funny if it was because of some AI coding
Please don’t remind me. Had a colleague with a senior title who just vibecoded on our CI pipeline and it ended up blocking deployments for half a day.
It is. Sometimes the big secret turns out to just be what we all thought was happening.
Maybe Kevin Fang will make a video about all combined?
My prejudice tells me that it’s vibe slopped code.
I saw people speculating about this, but it’ll be interesting to see if that’s really what it was (and if so, if they’d admit it).
I’m sure it was, and I’m sure they will not admit it.
So I’ll throw this into the “conspiracy theory, but probably true” pile; and I’ll try to remember to check snopes.com in 20 years to see if I was somehow wrong.
“Did Vibe coding really routinely break half the Internet is the 2020s?” …assuming the Internet and I are still both around by then…
Edit: I’m already wrong. It sounds like it was computers being stupid is old tried and true ways; not computers being stupid in new trendy ways.
Preliminary articles say this was a DDoS.
A DDoS that brings down the biggest(?) DDoS protection provider?
def possible, cloudflare DDoS their own dashboard a few months ago with some react code
https://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-dive-into-cloudflares-sept-12-dashboard-and-api-outage/
Based on what facts?
A statement from cloudflare blamed “a spike in unusual traffic”, but I guess the actual cause of the outage was a config file generated in response exceeded the max size
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/18/cloudflare-down-outage-traffic-spike-x-chatgpt.html
Technically a DoS, but not in the most common sense
So it was automation, but that automation might have been stupid the normal computer way, rather than stupid in the new LLM enhanced computer way.
As far as major outages, I can only think of around 10 going back 5 years. Sure there have been minor hiccups and glitches, but gosh, that’s life on the internet.
Yeah I have issues with my home setup at least that often. I can only think of two occasions where the solution took more effort than a reboot. Maybe we’re all just old enough for “every 6 months” to feel like every 5 mins
To clarify, by “issues” I mean “system stoppages not precipitated by me fucking with something.” I screw up my own system way more often than that lol
I don’t know how old you are brother, but it feels like I’m in one of those Star Trek warps where all the stars are just whizzing by.
Same! But the ones I cause don’t count.
It does feel like the major outages are growing closer together.
I want to blame plugging AI where it doesn’t belong, but I suppose that putting everything into the same couple of server closets could be the primary root cause.