[ccakes]

> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.

The point is that it doesn’t matter. A single site going down has a very small chance of impacting a large number of users. Cloudflare going down breaks an appreciable portion of the internet.

If Jim’s Big Blog only maintains 95% uptime, most people won’t care. If BofA were at 95%.. actually same. Most of the world aren’t BofA customers.

If Cloudflare is at 99.95% then the world suffers

[esrauch]

I'm not sure I follow the argument. If literally every individual site had an uncorrelated 99% uptime, that's still less available than a centralized 99.9% uptime. The "entire Internet" is much less available in the former setup.

It's like saying that Chipotle having X% chance of tainted food is worse than local burrito places having 2*X% chance of tainted food. It's true in the lens that each individual event affects more people, but if you removed that Chipotle and replaced with all local, the total amount of illness is still strictly higher, it's just tons of small events that are harder to write news articles about.

[psychoslave]

No it's like saying if one single point of failure in a global food supply chain fails, nobody's going to eat today. And which is in contrast to if some supplier fails to provide a local food truck today their customers will have to go to the restaurant next door.

[esrauch]

Ah ok, it is true that if there's a lot of fungible offerings that worse but uncorrelated uptime can be more robust.

I think the question then is how much of the Internet has fungible alternatives such that uncorrelated downtime can meaningfully be less impact. If you have a "to buy" shopping list, the existence of alternative shopping list products doesn't help you, when the one you use is down it's just down, the substitutes cannot substitute on short notice. Obviously for some things there's clear substitutes though, but actually I think "has fungible alternatives" is mostly correlated with "being down for 30 minutes doesn't matter", it seems that the things where you want the one specific site are the ones where availability matters more.

[hunter2_]

The restaurant-next-door analogy, representing fungibility, isn't quite right. If BofA is closed and you want to do something in person with them, you can't go to an unrelated bank. If Spotify goes down for an hour, you're not likely to become a YT Music subscriber as a stopgap even though they're somewhat fungible. You'll simply wait, and the question is: can I shuffle my schedule instead of elongating it?

A better analogy is that if the restaurant you'll be going to is unexpectedly closed for a little while, you would do an after-dinner errand before dinner instead and then visit the restaurant a bit later. If the problem affects both businesses (like a utility power outage) you're stuck, but you can simply rearrange your schedule if problems are local and uncorrelated.

[psychoslave]

If utility power outage is put on the table, then the analogy is almost everyone solely relying on the same grid, in contrast with being wired to a large set of independent providers or even using their own local solar panel or whatever autonomous energy source.

[Akronymus]

Also what about individual sites having 99% uptime while behind CF with an uncorrelated uptime of 99.9%?

Just because CF is up doesnt mean the site is

[johncolanduoni]

Look at it a user (or even operator) of one individual service that isn’t redundant or safety critical: if choice A has 1/2 the downtime of choice B, you can’t justify choosing choice B by virtue of choice A’s instability.

[moqmar]

That is exactly why you don't see Windows being used anymore in big corporations. /s

[shermantanktop]

Maybe worlds can just live without the internet for a few hours.

There are likely emergency services dependent on Cloudflare at this point, so I’m only semi serious.

[p-e-w]

The world dismantled landlines, phone booths, mail order catalogues, fax machines, tens of millions of storefronts, government offices, and entire industries in favor of the Internet.

So at this point no, the world can most definitely not “just live without the Internet”. And emergency services aren’t the only important thing that exists to the extent that anything else can just be handwaved away.

[1718627440]

In my opinion, the world actually should be able to live without the internet, but that's another matter.

[shermantanktop]

That’s what I was getting at. There’s a lot of life that can be lived offline.

[locknitpicker]

> Maybe worlds can just live without the internet for a few hours.

The world can also live a few hours without sewers, water supply, food, cars, air travel, etc.

But "can" and "should" are different words.

[raincole]

> A single site going down has a very small chance of impacting a large number of users

How? If Github is down how many people are affected? Google?

> Jim’s Big Blog only maintains 95% uptime, most people won’t care

Yeah, and in the world with Cloudflare people don't care if Jim's Blog is down either. So Cloudflare doesn't make things worse.

[dns_snek]

Terrible examples, Github and Google aren't just websites that one would place behind Cloudflare to try to improve their uptime (by caching, reducing load on the origin server, shielding from ddos attacks). They're their own big tech companies running complex services at a scale comparable to Cloudflare.

[chii]

> If Cloudflare is at 99.95% then the world suffers

if the world suffers, those doing the "suffering" needs to push that complaint/cost back up the chain - to the website operator, which would push the complaint/cost up to cloudflare.

The fact that nobody did - or just verbally complained without action - is evidence that they didn't really suffer.

In the mean time, BofA saved cost in making their site 99.95% uptime themselves (presumably cloudflare does it cheaper than they could individually). So the entire system became more efficient as a result.

[yfw]

They didnt really suffer or they dont have choice?

[locknitpicker]

> The fact that nobody did - or just verbally complained without action - is evidence that they didn't really suffer.

What an utterly clueless claim. You're literally posting in a thread with nearly 500 posts of people complaining. Taking action takes time. A business just doesn't switch cloud providers overnight.

I can tell you in no uncertain terms that there are businesses impacted by Cloudflare's frequent outages that started work shedding their dependency on Cloudflare's services. And it's not just because of these outages.