2mo ago

Massive internet outage reported: Google services, Cloudflare, Character.AI among dozens of services impacted

mashable.com /article/google-down-cloudflare-twitch-character-ai-internet-outage

Archive of cloudflare status

Google status

134 comments

Character.ai being mentioned in the same line is a sign of the times.
- The people yearn for the digital anime waifus
  
  If you're not running your waifu on a local machine she's just a digital prostitute.
  
  When you stop using a search engine and use AI-generated responses for everything, I guess having your LLM backends go down could qualify as having a disruptive functional impact.
- Well, the actual headline is:
  Massive internet outage: Google services, Cloudflare, Spotify all down, users report
  Character.ai is only mentioned in the lengthy list of services that are down.
  
  Massive internet outage reported: Google, Cloudflare, Twitch all down
  It even swapped in Twitch when I read it at the time. Headlines be changing.
  
  Still a very important service for many people who are alone.😢
- What is character.ai? Have I been living under a stone? When I visit the page I have to log in just to learn what it is?
  
  It's LLMs for ERP

Ohh that's why everything is slow and this is my sanity check.
But its scary how if Cloudflare went down most popular websites will go down with it
- Cloudflare is a cancer
  
  tell me more
  
  Redacted

Lemmy is working though. What else do we need?
- I think that at least some instances use Cloudflare for various things, so depending upon what and how much stuff at Cloudflare is broken, some lemmy instances may be impacted.

I remember the day I went why are we all selfhosting and still relying on a site like Cloudflare?.
I'm glad I agreed with me on it.
- this “me” character is so smart, aren’t they
  
  Oh, he's the best. Keeps me out of trouble, that one.
- I've migrated about half of my services off of cloudflare DNS proxy. Guess which half still worked this afternoon. (Self hosting pangolin with CrowdSec as replacement). I wasn't even using the cloudflare tunnel. Just their proxy for some bot mitigation.
  
  been really enjoying pangolin so far! i got scared and ended up not installing crowdsec.
  am i missing out? how hard would that be to add after the fact?
- still hard. most projects still CDN online instead of packaging into a single application.
  it's one of the most infuriating things about self-hosting. so I made my own self-hosted CDN and have rewrite rules that replace most public cdb domains and reroute them to my own local.
  it would be great if I could just have something in the middle that would download once and cache locally on request, but it's effort that would be taken from my time afk.
  
  By self-hosted you mean you have hardware geographically distributed? Like... boxes at friend's houses or...?
- I use it for DNS and domain hosting, but that's it, none of their proxying stuff.
  
  Why though? You have other options less detrimental to the internet than using and supporting them...
- I used Cloudflare tunneling for a while, then started to have similar thoughts. I'm off Cloudflare now.

This is my workday now
https://xkcd.com/303/
- Nowadays they will tell you to work on something else in the meantime.
  
  Your code can compile while you're in a retro, retrospectively looking back at the action items raised in a previous retro but not assigned any sprint time in the current sprint so you just raised a "what went wrong" about it not being planned and now you have more non-sprint work to do because every problem should be presented with a solution and if you could have that for the next retro they'll review this retro's action items and see if you have a proposal for fixing retro action items
  
  As someone who hasn't worked anywhere with a profit-motive in over a decade, I don't know how you guys do it. Truly...
- Yep

The problem was actually caused by Google Google Cloud went down hard on Thursday, and took Cloudflare and some of its customers with it.
- I've been looking everywhere for somebody to explain it. Like, there are dozens of articles outlining exactly what happened. Which I don't need because I was there. I know what happened. I just have been wondering why and finally you have provided a link that actually gives me a reason.
  So, thank you kind stranger.

*Laughs in self-hosting services.
- I wish I had that luxury with work.
  All my personal stuff is 100% unaffected though!
- You're not wrong. The gangly stacks of orchestrated black-box containers at a pubcloud beholden to shareholder whim is going to be a huge factor. Sorry grandma can't get her pills, but - phew - the number will still go up.
- Same. Feeling pretty good about using Anubis instead of Cloudflare for our dinky systems.

I actually enjoy when this happens. All this centralized shit will not end well.
- Centralized is control. Control is profit. It’s already not “well”, that’s why we’re here discussing it.

Another reason to self host 😊
- I’m pretty sure cloudflare has better uptime than you
  
  This is dumb...
  If you self host and your power goes out ...
  Think about it
  
  I prefer less uptime at saturday over a random rare outage.
- I do agree , the web needs to be decentralized, but does your server have similar uptime to cloudflare.
  
  Does it need to?

At work just about all major services are super slow or down. It's like cloud strike again.
Oh well I still get paid. But it's crazy how much centralization affects the world wide web.
- It’s like cloud strike again
  When The Cloud goes on Strike. Damn it they're just asking for more power, Scotty! Don't let those scabs cross the picket line!

Honestly, I didn't even notice.

We need to break up Cloudflare.
- It sucks because up until the "sales team" rugpull, they're the cheapest (and closest to reality) for bandwidth cost, virtually all the other CDN providers charge astronomical prices and their margins are hundreds to thousands of percentage.
  
  If the costs are mostly variable in how much they serve up, and uptime is sufficiently important, maybe have two CDNs and use the other one as a fallback when things start going tits-up?
- We just should not use cloudflare. Why is everybody still trying to use cloudflare.
  It drives me nuts. The default answer on all network problems: why don't you just use cloudflare? No! No no.
  
  We just should not use cloudflare. Why is everybody still trying to use cloudflare.
  Counterpoint: I find networking challenging, and I'm not particularly accountable for the natural consequences of not knowing how stuff works.
  This could end fine for everyone? Maybe an AI will understand it for me. (This is sarcasm. I agree with you.)

Dafuq is a character.ai and why is it in the same list as google and cloudflare? Like yea my local grocery store had some issues should that be on the list too?
- An AI chatbot that pretends to be a character and you roleplay with it.
  
  Back in my day, we just told Cleverbot to suck our dicks
- Had to include something AI because of the craze, probably picked at random
  
  It is very used actually. There's a lot of lonely people... :(
  (I don't use it tho, I just yell at the void on Fedi)

c/selfhosted having a field day rn
- Yeah, wonder how those cloudflare(d) tunnels werd keeping up.

The answer always seems to be: Cloudflare is fucking up again. This isn't the first time.

Google Cloud status page:
https://status.cloud.google.com/
- Thanks I have updated the Google link to this instead of downdector.
- Holy shit, goddamn near everything is down, nearly everywhere.
  Fucking Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, hope somebody has a save file they can reload from soon, otherwise... yeah...

Was trying to order food online and that was apparently affected.
Gotta love having all our eggs in one basket, eh? We learned something from the big ass east coast AWS outage!

Uh huh, just before a major democracy attacked an evil, evil country. Must be coincidence.
- Everything is a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works
  
  So tell me, how does the world work? We all hold hands and hug and cry together?
- You're funny.
- And that other huge democracy ongoing attacks on its own cities and economy.

I think https://pkg.go.dev/ is down too
- npm is having issues as well with publish and installs. Fun fun day.
  
  Time to forget about code and relax
- The whole internet is down. Unless you self host
  
  Stuff hosted by cloudflare is not the whole internet

Well that was fun!

ahem

Strangely enough, twitch streams and chat were working fine but everything else was broken, had an empty following list.
- It's seen tech talks by Twitch's engineering team. Some of those folks are scary smart.
  Not that it takes that much cleverness to avoid using CloudFlare, of course.
  But might be related. Twitch had some clever fallbacks and work-arounds for slow Internet, in that tech talk.

Good, we have a reason to touch grass now

??? My shit is working.

Oh no, not Cloudflare!
Oh right I use NextDNS, so anyway...
Oh, its also Google, Twitch, Discord and Etsy... and some AI girlfriend generator... and Spotify?
... People still use those? Aren't they worried about all the security and privacy concerns, the exploitative business models?
No?
Huh. Well, dang, sucks for those users I guess.
Ahem, annnyyyywaaaayyyy...
...
Ok, serious mode / tinfoil hat:
... Did maybe someone in the Trump admin just try to do a US internet blackout, given all the insane shit happening, and pulled a few wrong cords out?
...
Either way... and I cannot believe I am citing Ready Player One as a positive example of anything, but such is the nature of our collective degeneracy:
Tuesdays and Thursdays are now no internet days.
Go outside, touch grass, realize you're addicted to social media like a drug, and begin detoxing.
...
EDIT: Holy shit, Israel just struck Iran at multiple locations, presumably all or many related to their nuclear program... including Tehran.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/12/world/israel-iran-us-nuclear
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/13/israel-strike-iran-trump-nuclear-talks
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/live-blog/israel-strikes-iran-middle-east-conflict-live-updates-rcna212727
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-strike-conflict
info blackout tinfoilhattery intensifies
- realize you're addicted to social media like a drug
  Lemmy included.
  
  Speaking as someone who managed to quit smoking, but still uses a vape, who is focusing on doing daily PT after being maimed a while back...
  A step in the right direction is a step in the right direction, and taking one step at a time is better than none.
  Lemmy ain't corporate like Reddit, it ain't parasocial, only a very small number of users actually directly link their real identity to their psuedonym, and it doesn't have a worldclass datamining/profiling algo perfecting what content to feed to specifically you, to make you angry or insecure enough to keep you engaged.
  Perfect?
  No.
  Leagues better than every alternative?
  Far as I can tell, yes.
- Owhooo your virtual girl friend is offline!
  
  Jokes on you, my virtual girlfriend runs locally!

134 comments