On Tuesday, for less than an hour, early in the workday, it felt like the internet was down for many. The cause? Cloudflare went down. Cloudflare offers web services to over 16 million websites. That includes sites like HubSpot, Medium, UpWork, 9gag, Discord, Sirius XM, Shopify, Coinbase, Canva, Soundcloud, Buzzfeed, and Capitalogix.
Even down detector was down.

That means when Cloudflare went down, so did a non-trivial portion of the internet. W3techs reports approximately 10% of the internet was affected by Cloudflare being down.
What happened?
via DigitalAttackMap
There was a massive spike in CPU utilization. At the time, it looked like a DDOS attack. People were speculating that it was a Chinese attack trying to mess with the Hong Kong protests.
Turns out, it was bad code - specifically, a single misconfigured rule within their firewall services. They did a global rollout of the code, and so it affected everyone.
This shows the importance of staged rollouts - testing your releases live with test groups before being released globally.
Here's a great write-up from Andy Ellis on preventative measures in the future.
The reality is, using a CDN is still helpful, Cloudflare's downtime doesn't mean you shouldn't use them.
It does mean we should be thinking about what failsafes are needed to keep the internet infrastructure working in the event of attacks or failures.
Attacks are becoming more common, and as we now expect constant improvements/releases to software, we can expect more company errors as well. Facebook had similar issues on Wednesday.
Think of how much relies on the internet as a backbone. It's crazy to think about the impact sustained downtime would have; billions of dollars in business not happening, banking systems down, etc. Realistically, if the entire internet goes down we likely have bigger issues to worry about, but this event shows that large swaths of the internet could be affected at once.
Would a decentralized network help? Are smart contracts necessary for that? Is there a CDN for CDNs?
It feels like we often end up with more questions than answers.
It is why many companies opt for a hybrid cloud with plenty of on-premise compute.
What do you think?
Replicas: Deep Fakes and Voice Replication
Fake news was scary enough ... but now it is going to a new level. Technology is going to make it harder to find the “signal” in the “noise”.
Here is a preview of tech solutions (which already exist) that are likely to create a new set of problems and challenges for us in the future.
Replica is a company whose goal is to replicate celebrity voices. They see this as enabling creative applications of their voices without the commitment of the celebrity - of course the owner of the voice that's being replicated would control when/where it could be used.
Here's a video introducing Replica.
Combine that ability to simulate voices with deepfake technology (which can alter video in many ways, including to look like the mouth in the video is is saying the words that were simulated) and the potential for confusion or deception skyrockets.
Here is an example.
My guess is that you will hear a lot more about this soon because of upcoming elections. It will also become increasingly relevant in everyday life, business, trading, and legal situations.
A picture used to be worth a thousand words, but this may change that equation forever.
Posted at 06:18 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Film, Gadgets, Ideas, Market Commentary, Science, Trading Tools, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
Reblog (0)