What is Cloudflare? In simple terms, why did the outage of a single cloud service cause 20% of the websites worldwide to be inaccessible?

On the evening of the 18th Taiwan time, CloudFlare experienced an outage, and “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to continue” surged onto Google's trending search list. X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Claude, and other websites also encountered errors. Many people associated this incident with last month’s AWS crash. This article will attempt to explain what CloudFlare is with simple examples, why its outage can prevent global access to websites, and how this incident differs from the AWS outage.

(Cloudflare global outage: thousands of users affected, platforms like X and ChatGPT were temporarily inaccessible)

What is Cloudflare? Why do 20% of websites use global connected cloud?

Cloudflare is a cloud service oriented towards the “world” and is positioned as a Global Connectivity Cloud), an important internet infrastructure. Cloudflare is like community security, your home ( website) has a large warehouse ( where the real data is stored, possibly on AWS), and Cloudflare stands at the entrance, responsible for:

Help you block bad people

Help you quickly send out the package ( webpage ).

Guide the customer.

Install anti-theft devices at your door.

It will also help you do many things at the door ( calculation )

Most websites today are configured to route all traffic through Cloudflare. When Cloudflare goes down, it's like your home security locking the front door. Even if your AWS server is still alive, visitors cannot access the backend. Cloudflare has launched a free service for personal websites to capture market share, and currently about 20% of global internet traffic goes through Cloudflare, blocking an average of about 247 billion threats every day.

Cloudflare Core Product CDN: Accelerate Websites

To understand why Cloudflare is so important, you need to know that its core services include CDN, DDoS protection, and web firewall, etc. Generally, websites are hosted in one place, for example, AWS Tokyo (. If someone from the United States on the other side of the Pacific wants to access it, it will be very slow. Cloudflare's approach is to replicate your website's content across more than 330 cities worldwide through Cloudflare nodes. It's like placing your products in chain stores around the world, allowing customers to pick them up nearby. Therefore, the role of CDN is to speed up website loading.

Cloudflare DDoS protection, blocking malicious attacks

DDoS protection is like blocking malicious traffic attacks at your doorstep. A DDoS attack is when someone uses a large number of zombie computers to repeatedly ring your doorbell, attempting to take your home down. Cloudflare stands at the entrance, blocking all the traffic that looks suspicious, is extremely abnormal, and comes in too quickly and in large quantities; its function is to prevent bad actors from overwhelming your website.

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What is Cloudflare? An explanation in plain language on why a Cloud outage caused 20% of websites worldwide to be inaccessible. Originally appeared in Chain News ABMedia.