So what really happened to Cloudflare? Here's a simple explanation from the CTO of a major cloud provider

We asked Kyrylo Naumenko, CTO of the large cloud provider GigaCloud, to tell us in simple language: what happened and what can be done about it.

— What’s happening with Cloudflare?

— Cloudflare is a kind of international load balancer and gateway for protection against DDoS and cyberattacks. Simply put, wherever your site is located (and even if your site lives in several places), you can order Cloudflare services, and Cloudflare stands between you and the site’s customers, protecting it and balancing the load. Cloudflare is used by over 24 million active sites, so today, when the service had problems, it was felt by a lot of users, including in Ukraine.

The company itself, in its incident report, which was recorded around 13:00 Kyiv time, refers to unspecified «internal service disruptions.» Within two hours, Cloudflare reported that it had identified the source of the problem and was working on a solution. Services began to gradually return to work an hour after the incident was recorded.

The screenshot of today’s outage illustrates this well — you can see that everything is fine for you as a user, and for the site protected by Cloudflare, too, but the Cloudflare server is between you. In your screenshot, it may not be Toronto, but Brussels, Paris, or London, because such gateways are distributed all over the world.

— Why doesn’t Cloudflare have insurance for such cases?

— There is a safety net — Cloudflare is a very decentralized service. They use over 300 data centers in 125 countries around the world — they officially have no single point of failure. But we understand that there are no 100% SLAs.

— What is the alternative?

— There are alternatives to Cloudflare, but it is a very high-quality service, so it is most often used. In fact, they are the only and most convenient service «out of the box». So, regarding alternatives: AWS has the products AWS Route 53 — Cloudflare DNS (Domain Name System) and AWS Shield — Cloudflare DDoS Protection (Protection against DDoS attacks), but they replace only parts of the service.