The Company That Took Down The Internet

on June 21st 2022 a huge part of the internet went down worldwide because just one company screwed something up major services such as Discord Fitbit and Shopify were all inaccessible because of a mistake that cloudflare made while upgrading their servers but who the heck is cloudflare and why are they so important to the underlying infrastructure of the internet cloudflare is an American company that operates servers all over the world that provide services for a large number of clients probably the most important service is their content delivery Network or CDN a CDN is exactly what it sounds like it's a series of servers where cloudflare's customers can store content like videos music or anything else because a CDN is distributed a user at home that wants to pull up a video from their favorite streaming service that just made an incomprehensibly bad naming decision can get that video quickly and reliably from the closest server and there's also redundancy in case one or more nodes of the CDN go down for some reason the cloudflare CD en also provides security so they can protect clients from malware DDOS attacks and other intrusion attempts so websites don't have to build out all that security stuff on their own aside from being a CDN cloudflare also provides DNS services to a massive number of websites in case you don't know DNS stands for domain name system and it's what matches the typical web addresses you're familiar with to the numerical IP addresses your browser has to know in order to connect to the site those DNS records have to be stored somewhere so cloudflare offers DNS hosting and if you want to use the cloudflare network simply to access sites at home you can do this by navigating here in Windows and setting your DNS server to 1.1.1.1 cloudflare claims it's faster and more reliable than the DNS Services provided by most isps and although cloudflare has expanded to provide other services like cloud-based software development and corporate security their CDN and DNS offerings are what they're most known for in fact it's estimated around 20 of all internet traffic relies on cloudflare in some way but how did they get so big to the point that they're effectively a single point point of failure for a huge portion of the internet we'll tell you more right after we thank MSI for sponsoring this video meet msi's MPG z790 carbon Wi-Fi motherboard it supports 12th and 13th gen Intel core processors and ddr5 memory it features Lightning Fast connectivity with a Gen 5 pcie e16x slot and four gen 5m.2 slots along with two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports features an enhanced power design a premium thermal solution and a high quality PCB with stable and fast networking with both two and a half gig Lan and Intel Wi-Fi 6E it's got audio boost 5 for more immersive sound plus a pre-installed IO shield for your convenience so don't wait upgrade to the mpg z790 carbon Wi-Fi for the ultimate gaming experience we're gonna have it linked down below cloudflare started aggressively expanding in the early 2010s in fact they opened 10 facilities worldwide in just one month back in 2012 and at the time cloudflare only had 32 total employee that's less than us they were able to do this partly because their business model wasn't to build out their own data centers from scratch and hire an army of workers to manage them instead cloudflare co-located their servers in existing data center facilities and managed everything remotely in fact the only thing the on-site staff at these facilities got was a very short set of instructions on how to plug in cloudflare's equipment this made cloudflare an affordable solution that was also quite good at speeding up how website requests were process as much of their equipment was located inside of data centers that were already being used as large Network exchanges for the rest of the internet but even with cloudflare's decentralized nature the fact that so much of the internet uses it spells big trouble when the network has a problem the big outage that we mentioned at the beginning of the video cut the capacity of requests the network could handle in half and all because a single line of code was misplaced during an update that was ironically supposed to make the the network more reliable oh whoopsies although cloudflare understandably vowed to not let this happen ever again there was a somewhat similar incident back in 2020 where during an effort to resolve a congestion issue another single erroneous line of code shunted a massive amount of data to a single location in Atlanta overloading it and taking down thousands of sites and services for 27 minutes including League of Legends whose player base naturally reacted in a empathetic and understanding way they didn't like it and thank you for understanding that it makes me very happy that you watched this whole video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check out our other videos and comment below with video suggestions and also don't forget to subscribe and follow or I won't be as understanding I'm just kidding it's fine

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 357,631

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Id: FtTGGcXizsw

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023