Technical·May 24, 2026·5 min
Why Cloudflare Outages Take Down Thousands of Websites at Once
Cloudflare outages cascade across thousands of sites because they control the internet's front door. Here's what actually happens.
DNS propagation, certificate expiry, TLS handshake errors — the silent killers.
Cloudflare outages cascade across thousands of sites because they control the internet's front door. Here's what actually happens.
Shopify separates checkout infrastructure from admin systems to ensure payments process during outages. Here's the architecture behind it.
Roblox experiences predictable outages during school breaks due to concurrent user spikes, infrastructure scaling limits, and cascading system failures.
Steam's infrastructure uses content delivery networks, load balancing, and clever caching to prevent outages when millions of players download games simultaneously.
During internet outages, Instagram Stories typically fail before Feed Posts. Here's the technical architecture explaining why.
SSL certificate expiration causes cascading outages across major services. Here's why it keeps happening and what actually stops it.
Slack's architecture ensures messages arrive even during outages through redundancy, queuing, and clever deduplication strategies.
Understanding how TikTok's recommendation engine degrades under peak traffic and what happens to your feed when servers struggle.
PayPal uses idempotency keys and distributed consensus to prevent duplicate transactions when website outages interrupt payment processing.
Discord voice drops during peak gaming hours stem from packet loss, regional congestion, and codec switching. Here's what actually happens in the network.
Netflix processes 200M+ concurrent streams using redundancy, edge caching, and graceful degradation. Here's the engineering behind zero downtime.
In 2017, one AWS engineer's typo during routine maintenance took down S3 — and with it, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Medium, and thousands of other services. Here's what actually happened.
DNS is the phone book of the internet. Here's how it works, why DNS failures are so disruptive, and what happens during a DNS outage.
Cloudflare powers a significant portion of the internet. When it goes down, thousands of websites fail simultaneously. Here's what you need to know.
Understanding why an Amazon Web Services outage takes down hundreds of major websites simultaneously, and how to prepare your own site.
A site not loading could mean an outage, a regional block, a DNS issue, or a local network problem. Here is how to diagnose which one you are dealing with.