I've been operating a relatively small digital platform for 15 years. We don't use Cloudflare, for bots, we use tirreno (1), which we specifically created to filter malicious traffic.
For hosting, we use a local and sovereign EU provider.
If tomorrow Cloudflare, Amazon, and Microsoft were to somehow disappear or go permanently down, I wouldn't even notice.
If all you use them for
is caching, then they could provide webhooks for their scheduled maintenance so customers can disable cloudflare during the maintenance and reenable it once it's all good.
However, for customers using other things, perhaps we need an independent cloudflare for cloudflare service that serves its own cache of your site when cloudflare is inaccessible.
Could combine the two ideas so when there is scheduled cloudflare maintenance, it switches dns to the cloudflare for cloudflare service that uses cloudflare if online but if cloudflare is offline then serves cache, and once cloudflare maintenance is finished then restore cloudflare dns.
Looks like this time they first considered that they screwed up themselves, unlike the last time when they were fighting a phantom attack for a while until they realized that it was their own fault.
Having this kind of outage on a friday after what happened last month though is not a good thing... Props to them for getting back up so quickly but come on, these kinds of outages were not a thing a while back.
That single incident drops their uptime to four nines. Combine it with other recent incidents and they’re probably at three nines. That’s amateur level.
You are the future of the operational internet!