When outages happen, there is usually little explaining done or done late on a Friday with 'take out the trash' press release day.
So in a rare moment of total technical transparency, CloudFlare CEO Mathew Prince, took to the blog to lay it all out for us what happened yesterday with the big CloudFlare outage. He released a full postmortem on the November 18 outage that knocked many sites offline for more than an hour. A backbone routing change caused net traffic to build up in all the wrong places which broke DNS, CDN delivery, and most API access.
Here's What happened
- A routine routing update sent traffic through overloaded paths
- Latency and packet loss spiked
- DNS resolution slowed, amplifying failures
- They simply rolled back the changes to get restored service
Notes for SEOs
- Bot logs for that hour are unreliable
- DNS delays may show short term crawl timing quirks
- Annotate the incident in monitoring tools to avoid misreading spikes
Related:
- Cloudflare for SEO: A Deep Dive into Bot Management, AI Crawler Control, and Pay-Per-Crawl
- Cloudflare’s Content Signals: The Right Problem, An Unlikely Solution
- CloudFlare Topics
As the CEO and founder of Pubcon and WebmasterWorld., Brett Tabke has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of online marketing and search engine optimization. His journey in the computer industry has spanned over three decades and has made him a pioneering force behind digital evolution. Full Bio
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