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Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike (arstechnica.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

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[–] 56 points 11 months ago (9 children)

and it's fucking annoying to check the box to "prove you're a human" when trying to access almost any site. some days it will make me do it three times before letting me through

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  • [–] 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

    I understand the need for anti-bot or DDoS protection, but there are better and free options today. Like Anubis. So please, in the love of The Internet, move away from cloudflare. Ideally yesterday already.

    Edit: or run your own decent firewall with geo blocks. FireHOL block lists. Intrusion detection.

    Setting up fail2ban. . Etc. Etc.

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  • [+] 15 points 11 months ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Well then we are all fked. I recommend then using a good internet connection to host your stuff behind it. I also recommend a good firewall.

    A firewall that can block on geo location. Block on ASN level. And intrusion detection. And also use block lists like FireHOL level 1 to 4.

    Of course configure fail2ban etc.

    Again we really need to come up with alternatives now.. I'm sick of how the current internet develops.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago*

    Anubis isn't even comparable to cloudflare. The reason cloudflare is so effective is that they can oversee which IPs are spamming or being abusive to certain websites, and can throw up protections quickly. There are a number of negative implications that come with this, but it's quite good at its primary job.

    Anubis is just a prompt that wastes CPU cycles and tries to make it more expensive for AI crawlers to do so (since they care a lot about compute costs, of course). There is no bot protection or anything happening. The "making sure you're not a bot" is quite misleading imo

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    It isn't just annoying, it often breaks for people on less-popular browsers. Plus, it requires you to run Cloudflare's Javascript. You think this outage was bad—what do you think would happen if someone slipped them a bit of malware?

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    next time you're at bat against one of these, you may try moving less diligently / efficiently to the checkbox. overall, a slowed and less exact approach. I've not tested this enough to REALLY say it makes a difference, but in cases where I continually fail, going slower does seem to be the time I finally get through.

    I find the same for the picture puzzles where you select images that match or apply to the posted context or whatever else the mission may be.

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