1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,440 On June 21st, 2022, a huge part of the internet 2 00:00:03,440 --> 00:00:07,240 went down worldwide because just one company 3 00:00:07,240 --> 00:00:11,440 screwed something up. Major services such as Discord, Fitbit, and Shopify 4 00:00:11,440 --> 00:00:16,880 were all inaccessible because of a mistake that Cloudflare made while upgrading their servers. 5 00:00:16,880 --> 00:00:22,040 But who the heck is Cloudflare? And why are they so important to the underlying infrastructure of the internet? 6 00:00:22,040 --> 00:00:26,040 Cloudflare is an American company that operates servers all over the world 7 00:00:26,040 --> 00:00:30,760 that provide services for a large number of clients, probably the most important service 8 00:00:30,760 --> 00:00:33,800 is their Content Delivery Network, or CDN. 9 00:00:33,800 --> 00:00:38,960 A CDN is exactly what it sounds like. It's a series of servers where Cloudflare's customers 10 00:00:38,960 --> 00:00:42,480 can store content like videos, music, or anything else. 11 00:00:42,480 --> 00:00:46,360 Because a CDN is distributed, a user at home that wants to pull up a video 12 00:00:46,360 --> 00:00:50,760 from their favorite streaming service that just made an incomprehensibly bad naming decision 13 00:00:50,760 --> 00:00:54,480 can get that video quickly and reliably from the closest server. 14 00:00:54,480 --> 00:00:57,800 And there's also redundancy, in case one or more nodes of the CDN 15 00:00:57,800 --> 00:01:01,720 go down for some reason. The Cloudflare CDN also provides security 16 00:01:01,720 --> 00:01:06,760 so they can protect clients from malware, DDoS attacks, and other intrusion attempts 17 00:01:06,760 --> 00:01:11,400 so websites don't have to build out all that security stuff on their own. 18 00:01:11,400 --> 00:01:15,600 Aside from being a CDN, Cloudflare also provides DNS services 19 00:01:15,600 --> 00:01:18,920 to a massive number of websites. And in case you don't know, 20 00:01:18,920 --> 00:01:23,720 DNS stands for Domain Name System. And it's what matches the typical web addresses 21 00:01:23,720 --> 00:01:26,880 you're familiar with to the numerical IP addresses 22 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:30,280 your browser has to know in order to connect to the site. 23 00:01:30,280 --> 00:01:35,560 Those DNS records have to be stored somewhere so Cloudflare offers DNS hosting. 24 00:01:35,560 --> 00:01:39,720 And if you wanna use the Cloudflare network simply to access sites at home, 25 00:01:39,720 --> 00:01:46,000 you can do this by navigating here in Windows and setting your DNS server to 1.1.1.1. 26 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:51,920 Cloudflare claims it's faster and more reliable than the DNS services provided by most ISPs. 27 00:01:51,920 --> 00:01:56,800 And although Cloudflare has expanded to provide other services like cloud-based software development 28 00:01:56,800 --> 00:02:01,320 and corporate security, their CDN and DNS offerings are what they're most known for. 29 00:02:01,320 --> 00:02:07,740 In fact, it's estimated around 20% of all internet traffic relies on Cloudflare in some way. 30 00:02:07,740 --> 00:02:12,160 But how did they get so big to the point that they're effectively a single point of failure 31 00:02:12,160 --> 00:02:16,480 for a huge portion of the internet? Cloudflare started aggressively expanding 32 00:02:16,480 --> 00:02:20,700 in the early 2010s. In fact, they opened 10 facilities worldwide 33 00:02:20,700 --> 00:02:26,880 in just one month back in 2012. And at the time, Cloudflare only had 32 total employees. 34 00:02:26,880 --> 00:02:30,040 That's less than us. They were able to do this partly 35 00:02:30,040 --> 00:02:34,080 because their business model wasn't to build out their own data centers from scratch 36 00:02:34,080 --> 00:02:39,960 and hire an army of workers to manage them. Instead, Cloudflare co-located their servers 37 00:02:39,960 --> 00:02:44,240 in existing data center facilities and managed everything remotely. 38 00:02:44,240 --> 00:02:49,640 In fact, the only thing the on-site staff at these facilities got was a very short set of instructions 39 00:02:49,640 --> 00:02:54,100 on how to plug in Cloudflare's equipment. This made Cloudflare an affordable solution 40 00:02:54,100 --> 00:02:57,980 that was also quite good at speeding up how website requests were processed 41 00:02:57,980 --> 00:03:01,220 as much of their equipment was located inside of data centers 42 00:03:01,220 --> 00:03:05,300 that were already being used as large network exchanges for the rest of the internet. 43 00:03:05,300 --> 00:03:10,380 But even with Cloudflare's decentralized nature, the fact that so much of the internet uses it 44 00:03:10,380 --> 00:03:13,380 spells big trouble when the network has a problem. 45 00:03:13,380 --> 00:03:18,760 The big outage that we mentioned at the beginning of the video, cut the capacity of requests the network could handle 46 00:03:18,760 --> 00:03:22,080 in half and all because a single line of code 47 00:03:22,080 --> 00:03:25,940 was misplaced during an update that was, ironically, 48 00:03:25,940 --> 00:03:28,840 supposed to make the network more reliable. 49 00:03:29,840 --> 00:03:33,440 Whoopsies. Although Cloudflare understandably vowed 50 00:03:33,440 --> 00:03:37,760 to not let this happen ever again, there was a somewhat similar incident back in 2020 51 00:03:37,760 --> 00:03:42,720 where during an effort to resolve a congestion issue, another single erroneous line of code 52 00:03:42,720 --> 00:03:47,120 shunted a massive amount of data to a single location in Atlanta, 53 00:03:47,120 --> 00:03:51,600 overloading it and taking down thousands of sites and services for 27 minutes, 54 00:03:51,600 --> 00:03:54,880 including League of Legends, whose player base naturally reacted 55 00:03:54,880 --> 00:03:59,320 in a empathetic and understanding way. They didn't like it. 56 00:03:59,320 --> 00:04:03,240 And thank you for understanding that it makes me very happy that you watched this whole video. 57 00:04:03,240 --> 00:04:06,600 Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, check out our other videos 58 00:04:06,600 --> 00:04:10,480 and comment below with video suggestions. And also don't forget to subscribe and follow 59 00:04:10,480 --> 00:04:14,240 or I won't be as understanding. 60 00:04:14,240 --> 00:04:15,740 I'm just kidding, it's fine.