This post has been copied from my Tumblr blog. If you've seen it before, this is why.

So I use a shitty ancient laptop. A Dell Latitude E6420 from 2012: i5-2520m CPU, 16gb of RAM, 512gb SSD. Good enough for me. It's slow, it's thick, it's heavy, but it's got a lot of ports, it's sturdy, and it's repairable. I tried to get a newer laptop, one with a faster processor and bigger screen, but it was so thin and flimsy that it crashed if I looked at it wrong or picked it up while it was running. It was entirely plastic and shattered as soon as I dropped my backpack. With the laptop in the padded laptop compartment. And somehow, it had a maximum RAM capacity of 12gb- smaller than my shitty Latitude. So I switched back, and I still daily drive this hunk of shit business laptop.

Cloudflare is a large enterprise web service provider, which offers services such as DNS, DDoS protection, content delivery, reverse proxying, WAF, and many other things that I am not quite qualified to talk about. In short, though, Cloudflare runs the internet. So much so, in fact, that there has been three major outages in 2024 alone, affecting up to hundreds of thousands of customers each time.

This isn't isolated to 2024, though. Almost every year, something happens with Cloudflare, rendering significant portions of the Internet entirely unusable. And yet, despite this, basically every company with a website uses them. So my question is, why?

Why does half the Internet depend on a company that consistently leaves them hanging?