Serhiy Kolesnichenko, COO at Ukrainian cloud provider Ucloud, commented on the massive Cloudflare outage that disrupted internet services and websites around the world. He noted that Cloudflare’s powerful infrastructure is «difficult to crash with an attack,» but did not rule out the possibility of a «human factor».
Serhiy Kolesnichenko, COO at Ukrainian cloud provider Ucloud, commented on the massive Cloudflare outage that disrupted internet services and websites around the world. He noted that Cloudflare’s powerful infrastructure is «difficult to crash with an attack,» but did not rule out the possibility of a «human factor».
Kolesnichenko told dev.ua that if this factor affects 1-2% of the entire infrastructure, it will not be much on the scale of the company, but for users it will seem like they are witnessing a disaster.
At 1:48 p.m. Kyiv time, Cloudflare reported a problem, including widespread 500 errors, as well as crashes in the Cloudflare dashboard and API. The company said it was investigating the issue.
The outage has already affected X, Spotify, Amazon, OpenAI, PayPal, Uber, and others. Against this backdrop, the company’s shares have already fallen by 3,9%.
«We have detected a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services starting at 11:20 AM (UTC). This caused errors in some of the traffic passing through the Cloudflare network. While most traffic for most services continued to flow normally, there was an increased number of errors in several Cloudflare services,» the company said about the outage .
According to Serhiy Kolesnichenko, in complex systems like Cloudflare, everything is duplicated «many times.»
«It is important to maintain simplicity and a certain „elegance“ of the network so that the necessary fault tolerance does not become a source of problems due to the increase in the complexity of the network design. Sometimes this delicate balance between simplicity and fault tolerance is found after the failure, not before. CloudFlare has very professionally written post mortem reports, I think we will soon find out in detail what really happened,» said the Ucloud COO.
He added that Cloudflare «is attractive with its convenience» because it protects IT infrastructure, provides DDOS protection, CDN, and WAF services. However, Kolesnichenko noted that «what’s important is not what’s on the perimeter, but what’s inside.»
«It is difficult to imagine a Ukrainian publicly available service in a Ukrainian cloud or in a DC that would not survive a day without CloudFlare, the only question is whether this service is designed to temporarily abandon the services of a global player and quickly remove integration with it. In most cases, this will be a matter of service design — there will be enough network capacity and bandwidth,» says Serhiy Kolesnichenko.
