For people interested in such things, Cloudflare is down

[NQAS]

I'm not sure exactly what Cloudflare is, but I think it's pretty important.

And I usually wouldn't care about such things except for the fact that my website is down.

Don't know why, and don't know if we'll ever know, but ransomware comes to mind. Whether or not this is the case, ransomware is an issue, unfortunately, and if I were a massively large company, of any kind, I'd be spending whatever I had to to secure my systems.

In any case, hoping this is a quickly repaired problem.

[AllaN01Bear]

1. this is what i found and asked what is Cloudflare ?

Cloudflare is a free CDN type product that protects against threats such as SQL injection and identity theft. Cloudflare also improves site performance and speeds up loading times by using their multiple data centers that are located around the world.
cloudflare status page ,, https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
elevated errors in chicago and los angles.

[Blue_Adept]

2. It's basically a shield a lot of websites use to protect from attacks of all sorts

Big places use it and its Enterprise level protection.

Small sites use it, like mine, like places like DU, to stop DDOS attacks and other things because there are just so many. It's an invaluable service.

[RegularJam]

3. Not sure people are really aware...

Of how commonplace ransomware attacks are. I also don’t think many people are aware of how much it costs to develop and maintain some websites.

Ransomware is so prominent because of how big the payday is. My site was hit by ransomware. I have hundreds of thousand invested into my site. The site itself is worth millions on the market. The hackers got a very nice payday. The FBI was involved but they didn’t even come close to tracking them down or recouping the funds.

These things are seriously hurting small business. My site had was is considered to be excellent security. I’ve had it all reviewed. Changes have been made but there are no guarantees.

[ShazamIam]

4. Here is a nice easy article on why they are important.

https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/security/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cloudflare/

[blogslug]

5. From a quick scan of tech twitter, most are taking it in stride.

Some even joking that a Cloudflare outage is an annual thing.

Hopefully it's just a glitch.

[NQAS]

6. Funny how these things get normalized over time

I did some searching and found there was an outage about this time a year ago.

It was nothing more than an inconvenience for me. If I did something else today and didn't go to the office, I wouldn't have known. But it's still quite something to see that we have come to expect this sort of stuff, to the point that we're joking about it.

Maybe next January we'll hold winter barbecues to celebrate 1/6. Hey, these things happen. What are you gonna do?

Neil Postman wrote a book in 1985 called Amusing Ourselves to Death. I started listening to it a little while back and found that it was prescient in so many ways. Mainly about bread and circuses and how we really don't pay much attention.