#Tag
I got quoted in The Guardian again, I guess CloudFlare must have been down or something? :blobcatcoffee:
> “These companies have become too big to not fail. And because they handle so much traffic, when they do fail, this immediately becomes a massive problem”
There is a book called Normal Accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
The author puts forth three rules that define systems susceptible to catastrophic accidents which are completely to be expected:
- the system is complex
- the system is tightly coupled
- the system has catastrophic potential
This describes huge cloud providers like CloudFlare very well, and specifically describes the last outage very well.
CloudFlare, AWS, Azure, GCP are simply Too Big Not To Fail.
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and CloudFlare – services run by gigantic corporations with endless supply of money and talent – all experience catastrophic, global failures that take innumerable other services down with them within 30 days. :blob0w0:
Meanwhile Wikipedia just keeps chugging along, globally stable and reliable as always. :blobcatlove:
And yes, Wikimedia Foundation runs a pretty complex infrastructure:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_infrastructure
AWS, Microsoft Azure, and CloudFlare – services run by gigantic corporations with endless supply of money and talent – all experience catastrophic, global failures that take innumerable other services down with them within 30 days. :blob0w0:
Meanwhile Wikipedia just keeps chugging along, globally stable and reliable as always. :blobcatlove:
And yes, Wikimedia Foundation runs a pretty complex infrastructure:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_infrastructure
✅ invalid file
✅ deployed globally
✅ crashing the software
CloudFlare just pulled a CrowdStrike?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
There is a book called Normal Accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
The author puts forth three rules that define systems susceptible to catastrophic accidents which are completely to be expected:
- the system is complex
- the system is tightly coupled
- the system has catastrophic potential
This describes huge cloud providers like CloudFlare very well, and specifically describes the last outage very well.
CloudFlare, AWS, Azure, GCP are simply Too Big Not To Fail.
✅ invalid file
✅ deployed globally
✅ crashing the software
CloudFlare just pulled a CrowdStrike?
https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
If you absolutely must use XML as the format for your configuration files, at least have the common decency to provide a full schema. 
You will not believe the trick-or-treat trick Microsoft just pulled! 
Before anyone mentions how reliable Google Cloud is, here's a massive outage from June this year:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/16/google-cloud-outage-apology.html
And from October last year:
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/e3yQSE1ysCGjCVEn2q1h
You will not believe the trick-or-treat trick Microsoft just pulled!
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
