Swathes of the Internet are Down Due to Cloudflare Outage

Cloudflare, a widely-used provider of anti-DDoS services to a significant portion of websites on the internet, is out, leaving large portions of the internet inaccessible.

According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by 20.4% of all websites.

Cloudflare works by acting as a "reverse-proxy"; it sits in front of websites and takes requests from users and either forwards them to the real website or serves the request from their own servers.

The benefit is that the real IP address of the website is never revealed, and Cloudflare's massive globe-spanning network can take just about any attack thrown at it. It can also provide faster load times since Cloudflare's servers are located all over the globe and the site can be served from one closest to the user.

That is until there's an outage.

Previous Cloudflare outages have caused similar levels of distress, although admittedly some were not Cloudlfare's fault.

Similar instances have happened with products like Amazon Web Services, an incredibly popular cloud solution used by countless businesses and websites.

Instances like this bring into question the resiliency of the internet we rely on so heavily. Perhaps centralization of our web infrastructure isn't what we need for a strong and reliable internet: the strength of the internet, after all, is as a diverse and interconnected "web" of computers and networks.

If you're looking for something to do while your favorite sites are down, Privacy Guides remains unaffected, since we don't use Cloudflare's CDN/anti-DDoS services.