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Gnostic

Member

Registered: 2023-11-11

Posts: 30  

Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

Especially if you have been trying to explain to a non-IT-literate person.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,194  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

from what I have heard, they tried to recreate their code in rust and that led to the problems.

Further proof that rust isn't a silver bullet and that its overly hyped

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If you wish to be humbled, try to exalt yourself long term  If you wish to be exalted, try to humble yourself long term
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spliskin

Member

Registered: 2020-07-06

Posts: 18  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

@Gnostic

Rust is what happened to cloud flare. ;D
post here

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn

Member

Registered: 2023-11-27

Posts: 450  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

https://xkcd.com/2347/

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zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,194  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

@spliskin

Makes sense

---

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Feelings are not facts
If you wish to be humbled, try to exalt yourself long term  If you wish to be exalted, try to humble yourself long term
Favourite operating systems: Hyperbola Devuan OpenBSD Gnuinos
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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,936  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

Hello:

... picture is worth a thousand words.

Yes.

But only one word was needed: ineptitude.

Cloudfare is arguably an essential part of the web these days.
And those behind it (should) know it. Recent events make me wonder.

Whether that is the proper way to do things or not is for another discussion altogether.
But, like it or not, it is a fact: Cloudfare is a weak link without the needed redundancy.

Redundancy that the WWW was supposed to have, by design.
So it boils down to basic common sense: you do not fuck around with an essential part of the web.

Which is exactly what these DHs did.

A.

spliskin

Member

Registered: 2020-07-06

Posts: 18  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

Cloudflare - louded as one of the top developers in certain circles, should have known better than to release it so early without full vetting.

Nobody follows proper development cycles anymore either way. Knowing if a service of yours goes down it can cause that much trouble should inform you to be a more stringent and have hard policy as to production rollouts.

It's why I don't and won't work for them, that and their sales tactics; netflix as well. It's the reason I get annoyed when people complain about alternatives and still fail to realize that it's very difficult to replace things without some funding.

Gnostic

Member

Registered: 2023-11-11

Posts: 30  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

More RUST in the wheels of the internet.

On November 18, 2025, a significant portion of the internet went offline. X, ChatGPT, Canva, Letterboxd, and countless other services became inaccessible. The culprit? A single unwrap() call in Rust code that panicked across Cloudflare’s 330+ datacenters.

https://lucisqr.substack.com/p/the-clou … d-the-rust

spliskin

Member

Registered: 2020-07-06

Posts: 18  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

Good write-up, up front. Wish I could read the whole thing.

zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,194  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

One line of code caused all that?

I thought the web was built more like debian, not archlinux LOL.

I once made one tiny mistake in mkinitcpio.conf in Hyperbola and it wouldn't boot it dropped me to a shell.

The issue?

I didn't remove the parentheses from the i915 line

And therefore, I kept getting it borked every time I tried. lol.

This feels like that kind of situation.

---

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Feelings are not facts
If you wish to be humbled, try to exalt yourself long term  If you wish to be exalted, try to humble yourself long term
Favourite operating systems: Hyperbola Devuan OpenBSD Gnuinos
Peace Be With us All!

kaiyel

Member

Registered: 2019-10-16

Posts: 33  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

In retrospect perhaps our "technology leaders" should not have taken the decentralized network we call the Internet and centralized the crap out of it.  But will we have learned from this?  Doubt it.

blackhole

Member

Registered: 2020-03-16

Posts: 166  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

"I thought the web was built more like Debian"

Lets hope not:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/23/
https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list … Linux.html

Also:

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tra … ase/stable
https://bugs.debian.org/release-critica … n/all.html

FreeBSD for comparison

https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list … eebsd.html

Last edited by blackhole (2025-12-02 18:26:53)

greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2017-04-07

Posts: 1,336  

Website

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

Lol, not really that complex.

DuckDuckGo search terms: does cloudflare use ai to write code?

The answer at the top from the Duck's "search assist" (more ai, lol) :

Yes, Cloudflare uses AI models, such as Claude, to assist in writing code, particularly for projects like their OAuth library, where the AI-generated code is thoroughly reviewed by engineers for security and compliance. This approach allows for efficient coding while maintaining high standards of quality and safety.

Thoroughly reviewed bro...totally no hallucinating this time I swear...just push it, what's the worst that could happen bro?

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zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,194  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

blackhole what is the severity of those bugs though... how high are they rated? like 1-10

I meant debian because its known for stability. Not the security aspect lol.

Last edited by zapper (Yesterday 06:21:50)

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Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Feelings are not facts
If you wish to be humbled, try to exalt yourself long term  If you wish to be exalted, try to humble yourself long term
Favourite operating systems: Hyperbola Devuan OpenBSD Gnuinos
Peace Be With us All!

blackhole

Member

Registered: 2020-03-16

Posts: 166  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

You can drill down to get that info. My point is that, Debian is actually not this pinnacle of design and engineering that some believe it to be. It's the approach of freezing at these specific package versions and then patching, that creates many of these problems, then the backporting of "upstream" security patches to older versions has been shown to be unreliable time and again - i.e. those patching not understanding what they're patching, and not factoring in upstream changes in newer versions and their dependencies which could render the patch useless or detrimental (it has happened).Then there are the plethora of bugs which remain unfixed for the lifecycle of a release, because they either can't be easily fixed without upgrading components to newer versions or there is no one willing/able to do the work.

Last edited by blackhole (Yesterday 17:56:42)

Gnostic

Member

Registered: 2023-11-11

Posts: 30  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

We are still trying to teach our developers ideas and methods for resilient systems design. Simple things like having more than just Cloudflare as the DNS resolver. They looked puzzled last time, one even asked "Why would you need that?".

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,936  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

Hello:

... only one word was needed: ineptitude.

And it seems to be a gift that keeps on giving ...

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance
The Reg is still standing (this time) despite our best efforts
by Richard Speed - Fri 5 Dec 2025 // 10:16 UTC

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/ … age_again/

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (Today 10:39:30)

zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 1,194  

Re: Trying to explain what happened with Cloudflare?

@blackhole, pretty sure if they below 5, they are mostly irrelevant, but if they above 7 they are a huge problem hence why I asked the severity of the vulnerabilities.

Although, I suppose their stability method could also have security problems.

---

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Feelings are not facts
If you wish to be humbled, try to exalt yourself long term  If you wish to be exalted, try to humble yourself long term
Favourite operating systems: Hyperbola Devuan OpenBSD Gnuinos
Peace Be With us All!