After yesterday’s outage I’ve coded a simple tool to assess if your website uses Cloudflare. The idea is to help you identify if you use the service in the first place, becuase many companies are not even aware that they rely on Cloudflare for their website to be reachable.

Enter your website to check if you’re using Cloudflare:

If you need help migrating away from Cloudflare, feel free to reach out by email or via LinkedIN.

Original post written during the outage:

Major Cloudflare outage. Again. Everyone using the service has their website offline. That’s bad. 20% of all internet traffic is down. If you’re not sure if you’re using Cloudflare, check if you have the same error screen when you try to connect to your site.

Just a few weeks ago, Cloudflare had yet another major outage "just" affecting their first server cluster in the US (US-East), affecting many US based sites and apps. My sites are not affected as I have setup direct connections, and chose not to use the convenience of Cloudflare. This strategy has been working in both incidents. Direct internet connections is what made the Internet a genius system to start with. Unfortunately, we are moving further and further form the this goal. But this comes at a cost as we can see now. Did I mention that Cloudflare is free?

What’s Cloudflare and why is it used so much? Some of my clients have asked for Cloudflare to be installed. They basically then sit in between your website, and the person connecting to it. The benefit? Images and "heavy" files are cached, meaning they do not need to be constantly loaded from your server. It frees your server to cater to other requests. I’ve seen Terrabytes of traffic being reduced thanks to Cloudflare. They also provide convenience in setting up encryption (https). But: If their service goes down, every site using their service goes down. The "man-in-the-middle" is dead. Again: If you use Cloudflare, all the traffic between your user and your website goes through Cloudflare, whereby Cloudflare offers encryption to the user, then decrypts the https connection, and re-encrypts it to send to your website. By now, they are channeling a large part of global internet traffic through their infrastructure. It’s unnecessary. For many, Cloudflare is also a risk factor, and each project needs to do their own thread actor model to assess if it’s even needed. In many cases, Cloudflare’s conveniences clearly outweigh the risk of depending on yet another service, especially one that decrypts your data (in-transit).

For many projects I have been setting up custom server architecture, and it depends on each project if Cloudflare should be used. If you didn’t know about it and your site is down, it could be the right moment to check if you benefit from Cloudflare or if it’s time to get rid of that. It’s usually a quick fix (check comments).

Anyway, they’ll be back online shortly and this will be forgotten. ;)