A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

  • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    “You see, half the internet went down because people used our services a little too much.”

    Ok wtf???

    How does cloudflare not have DOS detection?

  • arsCynic@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike

    Just like my 14-year-old self who “mysteriously” bricked his parents’ PC by totally SFW Web usage.

  • mech@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Aren’t spikes in unusual traffic the exact thing Cloudflare is supposed to protect you from?

    • oppy1984@lemdro.id
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      13 hours ago

      Traffic spikes, on the Internet? One in a million chance! Now tow cloudflare outside the environment and call it a day.

    • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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      21 hours ago

      They protected the endpoints. They just weren’t able to route traffic to them. Id bet it takes a MUCH larger ddos to bring cloudflare to its knees vs your average website.

      • mech@feddit.org
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        21 hours ago

        From a Cloudflare customer’s point of view, I don’t care if my site is down from a DDOS or a Cloudflare outage, but the latter seems to happen more often.

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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          2 hours ago

          As it stands? Cloudflare is still incredibly effective at protecting customers from those DDOS attacks. Which, depending on your hosting solution, can mean very noticeable monetary savings because YOUR hardware/connection didn’t spike. And, regardless, can mean noticeable monetary savings as your engineers didn’t need to recover a crashed system because your setup was just sitting there idle.

          That said: If you truly need high availability? You need to do what downdetector did and have alternatives ready in the event that Cloudflare falls over. Same as with your ISP… which should be ISPs plural.

        • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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          20 hours ago

          From another cloudflare customer, if our sites still work internally it’s marginally better than them being broken both inside and outside the org as they would be if they were ddosed directly. I guess it depends on what kind of services you’re running.

    • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      ostensibly sure. But it’s like car insurance. People pay them no matter what so why bother doing what they promised?

    • locahosr443@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Amazon is now saving Americans from the crippling debt most of them seem to get into to drive a shiny box… I wasn’t expecting that.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      23 hours ago

      Buying a car is pretty capitalist.

      I’m not envious and I like the thought of some places on the planet having it normal for one family to have few cars, but - in certain places where capitalism has already been disrupted a few times in history, like Moscow, Russia where I, eh, reside, am headquartered, dwell, roam, … - and those places are richer than much of the world, - people would think the guy from the screenshot doesn’t have many reasons to try disrupting it.

    • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOP
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      1 day ago

      How many times have I told you not to download movies or games in the middle of the day? You’ll tie up the phone lines.

          • k0e3@lemmy.ca
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            22 hours ago

            I can’t even explain dial up modems to my son because I’d have to start by explaining what phone lines are.

            • Bluewing@lemmy.world
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              4 hours ago

              It wasn’t about the lines. It was always about the switches. And while they are no longer actual hardware, but rather software, those are still the what makes phones work.

          • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca
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            22 hours ago

            I think that’s a big part of why I like lemmy.

            There are plenty of tech-savvy critical thinkers in the younger generations, but the naïveté, tech illiteracy, and lack of critical thinking ability of the average internet commenter / poster is appalling.

            I’ve seen it just get worse and worse.

            The internalized self censorship, the laissez faire attitude towards digital privacy, just pure fucking idiocy.

            Wake me up when September ends.

        • curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
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          19 hours ago

          No longer relevant pro tip - an extra pair was typically left at the incoming service, which was used for testing. It worked as a second line and didn’t interupt the main pair, allowing for a functionally free second phone line (that didnt have incoming service).

          Perfect for modem use!

      • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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        21 hours ago

        I had fully forgotten the phrase “you’ll tie up the phone line!” And I just had a nam style flashback of sneaking internet time during the day when my mom was at work, and praying that no one tried to call

      • ooterness@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

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    1 day ago

    I hope more websites will move away from cloudflare. I could not access 90% of the web anymore. This is insane if just 1 company goes down, the whole internet is dead. The internet is broken!

    • mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      and it’s fucking annoying to check the box to “prove you’re a human” when trying to access almost any site. some days it will make me do it three times before letting me through

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        24 hours ago

        I understand the need for anti-bot or DDoS protection, but there are better and free options today. Like Anubis. So please, in the love of The Internet, move away from cloudflare. Ideally yesterday already.

        Edit: or run your own decent firewall with geo blocks. FireHOL block lists. Intrusion detection.

        Setting up fail2ban. . Etc. Etc.

        • Xylight@lemdro.id
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          13 hours ago

          Anubis isn’t even comparable to cloudflare. The reason cloudflare is so effective is that they can oversee which IPs are spamming or being abusive to certain websites, and can throw up protections quickly. There are a number of negative implications that come with this, but it’s quite good at its primary job.

          Anubis is just a prompt that wastes CPU cycles and tries to make it more expensive for AI crawlers to do so (since they care a lot about compute costs, of course). There is no bot protection or anything happening. The “making sure you’re not a bot” is quite misleading imo

        • _cryptagion [he/him]@anarchist.nexus
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          22 hours ago

          Anubis is to protect against scraping from LLMs, it has nothing to do with DDoS protection. Not only that, but the Anubis Github repo recommends most people to use Cloudflare instead, since Anubis is the “nuclear” option.

          • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
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            21 hours ago

            Well then we are all fked. I recommend then using a good internet connection to host your stuff behind it. I also recommend a good firewall.

            A firewall that can block on geo location. Block on ASN level. And intrusion detection. And also use block lists like FireHOL level 1 to 4.

            Of course configure fail2ban etc.

            Again we really need to come up with alternatives now… I’m sick of how the current internet develops.

      • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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        20 hours ago

        It isn’t just annoying, it often breaks for people on less-popular browsers. Plus, it requires you to run Cloudflare’s Javascript. You think this outage was bad—what do you think would happen if someone slipped them a bit of malware?

      • modular950@lemmy.zip
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        24 hours ago

        next time you’re at bat against one of these, you may try moving less diligently / efficiently to the checkbox. overall, a slowed and less exact approach. I’ve not tested this enough to REALLY say it makes a difference, but in cases where I continually fail, going slower does seem to be the time I finally get through.

        I find the same for the picture puzzles where you select images that match or apply to the posted context or whatever else the mission may be.

  • themurphy@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    It’s very normal for countries to DDOS each other to test their limits, and if it could be incorporated in an attack.

    And yes, of course the US is also testing this against other nations.

    It could also just be a malfunction or someone acting independently. Who knows.

  • devfuuu@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Capitalists: “All lines must go up!” … (Traffic line goes up a little bit) Capitalists: “Not like that!”

    • breakingcups@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Absolute bonkers speculation and it’s wild that it got as many upvotes as downvotes.

      There’s not even a hint of a suggestion that these two things would be related and it’d be a pretty stupid move to pull. This doesn’t hinder ICE that much and massively hinders many people all around the globe. Want to hinder communications? You’d jam ICE radios, not my muffin recipe website, (some) fediverse instances, and thousands of other websites.

      Go outside, breath some air, recalibrate. This level of obsession is not good for you and won’t help the good causes you want to help either.

    • Acamon@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Was there a specific event that coincided with the blackout? I don’t know the details of current US events, just that they’re crazy and depressing.

    • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOP
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      Why DDoS Cloudflare when they could just pressure them directly like they did with BBC or Paramount? I know this administration isn’t exactly the brightest but that doesn’t seem like something they’d do.

      • k0e3@lemmy.ca
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        22 hours ago

        I thought OP was saying people are resisting ICE by DDoSing CloudFlare while you might be thinking ICE (therefore the administration) is attacking CloudFlare. Either way, it doesn’t make much sense lol

    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      They suspended access to WARP from London during the outage, so I guess the traffic was originating/hitting that location

    • optissima@lemmy.ml
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      This is a much more positive view than mine, which is that AI corps are trying to make the rest of the internet less reliable to drive traffic to themselves but it failed/backfired I’d only heard about X before reading the article