On June 21st, 2022, a huge part of the internet
went down worldwide because just one company
screwed something up. Major services such as Discord, Fitbit, and Shopify
were all inaccessible because of a mistake that Cloudflare made while upgrading their servers.
But who the heck is Cloudflare? And why are they so important to the underlying infrastructure of the internet?
Cloudflare is an American company that operates servers all over the world
that provide services for a large number of clients, probably the most important service
is their Content Delivery Network, or CDN.
A CDN is exactly what it sounds like. It's a series of servers where Cloudflare's customers
can store content like videos, music, or anything else.
Because a CDN is distributed, a user at home that wants to pull up a video
from their favorite streaming service that just made an incomprehensibly bad naming decision
can get that video quickly and reliably from the closest server.
And there's also redundancy, in case one or more nodes of the CDN
go down for some reason. The Cloudflare CDN also provides security
so they can protect clients from malware, DDoS attacks, and other intrusion attempts
so websites don't have to build out all that security stuff on their own.
Aside from being a CDN, Cloudflare also provides DNS services
to a massive number of websites. And in case you don't know,
DNS stands for Domain Name System. And it's what matches the typical web addresses
you're familiar with to the numerical IP addresses
your browser has to know in order to connect to the site.
Those DNS records have to be stored somewhere so Cloudflare offers DNS hosting.
And if you wanna use the Cloudflare network simply to access sites at home,
you can do this by navigating here in Windows and setting your DNS server to 1.1.1.1.
Cloudflare claims it's faster and more reliable than the DNS services provided by most ISPs.
And although Cloudflare has expanded to provide other services like cloud-based software development
and corporate security, their CDN and DNS offerings are what they're most known for.
In fact, it's estimated around 20% of all internet traffic relies on Cloudflare in some way.
But how did they get so big to the point that they're effectively a single point of failure
for a huge portion of the internet? Cloudflare started aggressively expanding
in the early 2010s. In fact, they opened 10 facilities worldwide
in just one month back in 2012. And at the time, Cloudflare only had 32 total employees.
That's less than us. They were able to do this partly
because their business model wasn't to build out their own data centers from scratch
and hire an army of workers to manage them. Instead, Cloudflare co-located their servers
in existing data center facilities and managed everything remotely.
In fact, the only thing the on-site staff at these facilities got was a very short set of instructions
on how to plug in Cloudflare's equipment. This made Cloudflare an affordable solution
that was also quite good at speeding up how website requests were processed
as much of their equipment was located inside of data centers
that were already being used as large network exchanges for the rest of the internet.
But even with Cloudflare's decentralized nature, the fact that so much of the internet uses it
spells big trouble when the network has a problem.
The big outage that we mentioned at the beginning of the video, cut the capacity of requests the network could handle
in half and all because a single line of code
was misplaced during an update that was, ironically,
supposed to make the network more reliable.
Whoopsies. Although Cloudflare understandably vowed
to not let this happen ever again, there was a somewhat similar incident back in 2020
where during an effort to resolve a congestion issue, another single erroneous line of code
shunted a massive amount of data to a single location in Atlanta,
overloading it and taking down thousands of sites and services for 27 minutes,
including League of Legends, whose player base naturally reacted
in a empathetic and understanding way. They didn't like it.
And thank you for understanding that it makes me very happy that you watched this whole video.
Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, check out our other videos
and comment below with video suggestions. And also don't forget to subscribe and follow
or I won't be as understanding.
I'm just kidding, it's fine.