What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a middle man between a website and the people visiting it.

When you visit a site that uses Cloudflare, your traffic often goes through Cloudflare’s network first.

This brings security, speed, and stability.

you can think of it as:

• A security guard
• A traffic manager
• A speed booster
• A global delivery system

for websites and apps.

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How Cloudflare Affects Our Daily Life

Even if you’ve never used it directly, you interact with Cloudflare every day because:

It Helps Websites load faster

• Shopping sites, news, games, blogs—many run through Cloudflare’s CDN.

It Makes Fewer outages (?)

• When a site gets too much traffic, Cloudflare absorbs the excess.

It Helps More secure browsing

• Helps prevent your favorite apps and sites from being hacked.

It Secure Privacy

• The 1.1.1.1 DNS app protects your DNS queries from being tracked.

Better experience during high traffic events

• Concert ticket sales
• Big product drops
• Black Friday

Cloudflare keeps sites stable.

Reduces internet congestion

• Caching data near users lowers worldwide bandwidth usage.

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What are the Major Services that Cloudflare Provides? Compares to the alternatives

We’ve selected the "Best Choice" based on the needs of the average modern developer or company: High Performance, Low Maintenance, and Cost Efficiency.

Comparison: Cloudflare vs. Commercial Rivals vs. Open Source

TL;DR

1. Wins on "Edge" and "Defense": Cloudflare dominates in public-facing infrastructure—such as CDN, DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, and Bot Management. Leveraging its massive global network effects, it offers significantly lower costs (often free) compared to AWS and provides protection that is far more powerful and hassle-free than self-hosted (Open Source) alternatives. It is the default "best choice" for the vast majority of web applications.
2. Loses on "Deep, Specialized Requirements": It is not the silver bullet for every scenario. For cost-sensitive mass storage (Self-hosted MinIO wins), pure internal network access (Tailscale is more intuitive), long-running computations (AWS Lambda wins), or single-server load balancing (NGINX wins), specialized open-source tools or traditional cloud services offer a distinct advantage.

💡 Best Architectural Strategy: "Cloudflare for the Perimeter, Specialized Tools for the Core." Offload traffic acceleration and security defense to Cloudflare, while reserving data storage and internal networking for dedicated tools like MinIO, Tailscale, or NGINX. This approach yields the most balanced modern architecture in terms of performance, cost, and maintenance effort.

Service	Major Commercial Rival	Open Source / Self-Hosted	🏆 Best Choice & Why
1. CDN	AWS CloudFront	Varnish Cache	Cloudflare. It requires zero configuration to start, and the free tier is generous. AWS CloudFront is complex to configure, and Varnish requires managing your own hardware.
2. DDoS Protection	AWS Shield	HAProxy (Rate Limiting)	Cloudflare. It offers unmetered mitigation (flat rate/free). AWS Shield Advanced is very expensive ($3,000/mo base), and self-hosting fails because your ISP pipe will clog before your server does.
3. WAF	AWS WAF	ModSecurity	Cloudflare. Their rules update automatically based on global threats. ModSecurity requires constant manual tuning to prevent false positives, and AWS charges per rule/request.
4. DNS	AWS Route53	BIND	Cloudflare. It is objectively the fastest DNS in the world (per independent benchmarks) and focuses heavily on privacy. Route53 is excellent but slower.
5. Zero Trust	Zscaler	WireGuard / Headscale	Tailscale (Open Source based) or Cloudflare. For pure VPN replacement, Tailscale (built on WireGuard) is the easiest. For securing web apps without code changes, Cloudflare Access is the winner.
6. Load Balancing	AWS ELB	NGINX	Depends on Scope. NGINX is the king for balancing traffic inside a single data center (local). Cloudflare is the winner for balancing traffic between different countries (global).
7. Workers	AWS Lambda	OpenFaaS	Cloudflare Workers. For high-traffic/low-latency tasks, Cloudflare wins due to 0ms cold starts and lower costs. AWS Lambda is better only if you need long execution times (e.g., >30 seconds).
8. R2 Storage	AWS S3	MinIO	Cloudflare R2. If you serve public data (images/video), R2 wins because it has zero egress fees. AWS S3 is the "standard" for backend archiving, but the bandwidth fees are a "hidden tax."
9. Bot Management	DataDome	CrowdSec	Cloudflare. Because Cloudflare sees ~20% of all web traffic, their ability to spot a bot on one site and block it on yours instantly is unmatched by smaller open-source lists.

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So you can see How Cloudflare importance in our life. But you’ve also experienced the web outage happened few days ago,

Why There’s a Web Outage happened few days ago?

Here’s The Short answer:

It wasn’t a cyberattack, nevertheless, It’s an internal software error caused by a database update.

Imagine you have a backpack that can strictly hold only 10 books. Cloudflare accidentally tried to stuff 20 books into it. The backpack ripped apart, and all the books fell out, causing the system to crash.

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The "GG" Moment: What Actually Broke Cloudflare?

If you're wondering why half the internet—including platforms like Zeabur—tripped over itself recently, we finally have the post-mortem on Cloudflare's worst outage since 2019.

Spoiler alert: It wasn't a hacker; it was a "fat finger" moment during a routine cleanup.

Basically, Cloudflare engineers were trying to optimize database permissions for their Bot Management service (specifically within ClickHouse). It sounds like a boring task for Tuesday, but the change backfired spectacularly. It caused the system to generate a "super massive" configuration file—a file so bloated that Cloudflare's edge servers physically couldn't handle it.

Here is the chaotic part: This bad file wasn't just a one-time thing. The system was generating and syncing this massive file to data centers globally every 5 minutes. The moment a server received the file, its core CDN service would immediately crash (or, as the source perfectly put it, "go GG").

Because the crash happened on this precise 5-minute loop—working, then crashing, then working—the monitoring graphs looked erratic. This totally fooled the Cloudflare team. They spent the first chunk of the outage hunting for a DDoS attack because the symptoms looked exactly like a flood of bad traffic.

The Ripple Effect: The damage was widespread. For example, Zeabur (a deployment platform) went down because their own backend APIs rely on Cloudflare for protection and speed. But it was a double-whammy: even the upstream services Zeabur relies on, like their email providers-resend, were also using Cloudflare and got knocked offline. It was a classic domino effect, all started by one bad database config.

That’s you know why the outage is a huge deal for all around the world

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In one sentence

Cloudflare is the hidden infrastructure behind a huge part of the internet, making websites faster, safer, and more stable, which directly improves your daily online experience without you even noticing.

I just truly hope that there’s better not have another outage caused by the same mistake.