WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.440 On June 21st, 2022, a huge part of the internet 00:00:03.440 --> 00:00:07.240 went down worldwide because just one company 00:00:07.240 --> 00:00:11.440 screwed something up. Major services such as Discord, Fitbit, and Shopify 00:00:11.440 --> 00:00:16.880 were all inaccessible because of a mistake that Cloudflare made while upgrading their servers. 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? 00:00:22.040 --> 00:00:26.040 Cloudflare is an American company that operates servers all over the world 00:00:26.040 --> 00:00:30.760 that provide services for a large number of clients, probably the most important service 00:00:30.760 --> 00:00:33.800 is their Content Delivery Network, or CDN. 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 00:00:38.960 --> 00:00:42.480 can store content like videos, music, or anything else. 00:00:42.480 --> 00:00:46.360 Because a CDN is distributed, a user at home that wants to pull up a video 00:00:46.360 --> 00:00:50.760 from their favorite streaming service that just made an incomprehensibly bad naming decision 00:00:50.760 --> 00:00:54.480 can get that video quickly and reliably from the closest server. 00:00:54.480 --> 00:00:57.800 And there's also redundancy, in case one or more nodes of the CDN 00:00:57.800 --> 00:01:01.720 go down for some reason. The Cloudflare CDN also provides security 00:01:01.720 --> 00:01:06.760 so they can protect clients from malware, DDoS attacks, and other intrusion attempts 00:01:06.760 --> 00:01:11.400 so websites don't have to build out all that security stuff on their own. 00:01:11.400 --> 00:01:15.600 Aside from being a CDN, Cloudflare also provides DNS services 00:01:15.600 --> 00:01:18.920 to a massive number of websites. And in case you don't know, 00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:23.720 DNS stands for Domain Name System. And it's what matches the typical web addresses 00:01:23.720 --> 00:01:26.880 you're familiar with to the numerical IP addresses 00:01:26.880 --> 00:01:30.280 your browser has to know in order to connect to the site. 00:01:30.280 --> 00:01:35.560 Those DNS records have to be stored somewhere so Cloudflare offers DNS hosting. 00:01:35.560 --> 00:01:39.720 And if you wanna use the Cloudflare network simply to access sites at home, 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. 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:51.920 Cloudflare claims it's faster and more reliable than the DNS services provided by most ISPs. 00:01:51.920 --> 00:01:56.800 And although Cloudflare has expanded to provide other services like cloud-based software development 00:01:56.800 --> 00:02:01.320 and corporate security, their CDN and DNS offerings are what they're most known for. 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. 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 00:02:12.160 --> 00:02:16.480 for a huge portion of the internet? Cloudflare started aggressively expanding 00:02:16.480 --> 00:02:20.700 in the early 2010s. In fact, they opened 10 facilities worldwide 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. 00:02:26.880 --> 00:02:30.040 That's less than us. They were able to do this partly 00:02:30.040 --> 00:02:34.080 because their business model wasn't to build out their own data centers from scratch 00:02:34.080 --> 00:02:39.960 and hire an army of workers to manage them. Instead, Cloudflare co-located their servers 00:02:39.960 --> 00:02:44.240 in existing data center facilities and managed everything remotely. 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 00:02:49.640 --> 00:02:54.100 on how to plug in Cloudflare's equipment. This made Cloudflare an affordable solution 00:02:54.100 --> 00:02:57.980 that was also quite good at speeding up how website requests were processed 00:02:57.980 --> 00:03:01.220 as much of their equipment was located inside of data centers 00:03:01.220 --> 00:03:05.300 that were already being used as large network exchanges for the rest of the internet. 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 00:03:10.380 --> 00:03:13.380 spells big trouble when the network has a problem. 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 00:03:18.760 --> 00:03:22.080 in half and all because a single line of code 00:03:22.080 --> 00:03:25.940 was misplaced during an update that was, ironically, 00:03:25.940 --> 00:03:28.840 supposed to make the network more reliable. 00:03:29.840 --> 00:03:33.440 Whoopsies. Although Cloudflare understandably vowed 00:03:33.440 --> 00:03:37.760 to not let this happen ever again, there was a somewhat similar incident back in 2020 00:03:37.760 --> 00:03:42.720 where during an effort to resolve a congestion issue, another single erroneous line of code 00:03:42.720 --> 00:03:47.120 shunted a massive amount of data to a single location in Atlanta, 00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:51.600 overloading it and taking down thousands of sites and services for 27 minutes, 00:03:51.600 --> 00:03:54.880 including League of Legends, whose player base naturally reacted 00:03:54.880 --> 00:03:59.320 in a empathetic and understanding way. They didn't like it. 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. 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 00:04:06.600 --> 00:04:10.480 and comment below with video suggestions. And also don't forget to subscribe and follow 00:04:10.480 --> 00:04:14.240 or I won't be as understanding. 00:04:14.240 --> 00:04:15.740 I'm just kidding, it's fine.