Something tragic happened over the weekend. Cloudflare went nuts and knocked 785,000 websites offline for about an hour.  Think of all the cat memes that went unseen during the 5:00 am EST hour on Sunday.  In all seriousness though, sometimes the tools we use to do business fail us.  What do we do then?

Cloudflare stands in between a website and the user to prevent denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other security issues to ensure that your website continues operating efficiently.  Over the weekend, while Cloudflare was performing its duty and protecting an unsuspecting site from a distributed DDoS attack, a router issue caused the melt down that knocked three quarters of a million sites offline.

In the world of digital media, we are beholden to our tools.  We have tools for publishing and tools for emailing, we have tools that monitor our websites and tools that protect them against attacks.  We even have tools that monitor the performance of other tools.   It’s a given that at some point one or more of these tools are going to fail us and put a kink in our plans.  Cloudflare impressively took full responsibility for the outage – even though the issue was their vendor’s fault – and CEO Matthew Prince promised he would make it right to their customers.