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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation? First with the Twitter posts and now this blogpost. They're a passive observer, not involved in this event, and yet they keep putting themselves in the middle of it.

Cloudflare staff are not Facebook staff, they do not know how things actually went down to trigger the events that transpired. They are essentially doing glorified bikeshedding, and providing an explainer of how BGP works that can be gleaned by reading virtually any introductory text on it, and using it as a marketing opportunity.

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> They are essentially doing glorified bikeshedding, and providing an explainer of how BGP works that can be gleaned by reading virtually any introductory text on it, and using it as a marketing opportunity.

I mean, I'm not really sure what the purpose of a corporate blog is except that? You make posts about whatever will garner attention in order to get some views, maybe spread some information, and - of course - turn it into a marketing opportunity. That's the job, no?

> Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation?

Personally? No. Although amusingly, a non-technical friend of mine took the twitter posts they made as a sign that Cloudflare had caused the outage somehow, so it's certainly possible there's a risk there.

And from one of your other comments:

> Next time Cloudflare's CDN eats itself and starts vomiting up private customer data, Facebook can do a blogpost titled 'Understanding how Cloudflare exposed the private information of untold numbers of its customers'.

Yes, they should totally do that (at least if they have anything informative to contribute, as I think Cloudflare does here). Why would this be a bad thing, or a reason not to talk about Facebook's issues? And I mean, at one point today something like 6+ of the top 10 links on HN were about Facebook, so I mean, everyone else is talking about them. Why not Cloudflare? And if and when Cloudflare has their next big issue, everyone will be talking about them either way.

The CEO recently pointed out on Twitter that the primary purpose of the company blog was hiring, and that the company would write with that in mind. The post taught me something I didn’t already know, and left me more impressed than I was before with Cloudflare. Mission accomplished.

I mean... they're in the business of keeping websites online. It's natural that they document these events both for their own research and to market their product.

It's merely an informative blog post on a topic many people are interested in. I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.

> I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.

You kinda inadvertently highlighted the issue: because they had nothing to do with it, they do not know what actually happened. They can pontificate about likely causes, just like others in the industry can, but they have no idea what actually caused the issue.

At no point in the blog post did they offer any conjecture about what was happening at Facebook. All of their information was general descriptions of DNS and BGP, or descriptions of how the Facebook outage was experienced on their end from running a DNS resolver. That in and of itself makes for an interesting and informative perspective.

If you read the blog post, you'll see that it's speculation-free facts about what happened. BGP announcements happened at time t, DNS started failing at t+n, DNS requests spiked, BGP updates happened at t', DNS returned to normal at t'+n.

I assume you did not read the blog post? It’s just a technical post describing the outage from Cloudflare’s perspective and mostly focuses on the increased traffic to 1.1.1.1 and the latency it caused

You can pontificate about likely contents of Cloudfare’s blog post, just like others who did not read it, but clearly you have no idea what it actually contains

I think your criticism is unfair.

> They can pontificate about likely causes

They can, but they didn't.

They don't claim to; they had useful information to share and shared it in a way that was helpful and informative to the lay engineer.

It is little stuff like this that makes it come off a bit self-aggrandizing:

> We keep track of all the BGP updates and announcements we see in our global network. At our scale, the data we collect gives us a view of how the Internet is connected and where the traffic is meant to flow from and to everywhere on the planet.

> Fortunately, 1.1.1.1 was built to be Free, Private, Fast (as the independent DNS monitor DNSPerf can attest), and scalable, and we were able to keep servicing our users with minimal impact.

It isn’t a big deal, and the posts are still interesting. It just makes me roll my eyes a bit.

It's a proud and confident type of marketing. A bit on the nose.

I very much prefer that over the almost patronizing, overly friendly tone some others have, or the stripped of any personality style that most have.

They've done this in previous outages and people didn't like it then, either.

Generally big companies don't talk smack about other big companies having internet-wide issues, unless those issues are directly caused by the other company.

For instance, when Google talked about Cloudbleed, which was when Cloudflare vomited millions of secrets all over Google's caching heirarchy and Google had to manually clean it up.

I think perhaps the Cloudflare people have gotten confused and think that means it's okay to talk about other people's stuff. Instead of interpreting it as it really is, which is that Cloudflare is the last company that should be criticizing everyone else, lest someone bring up their previous missteps.

I still remember Cloudflare's PR efforts to downplay Cloudbleed. A key reason why I meticulously avoid using any of their services.

Given that warp is a pretty major player in the VPN space and lots of their customers are likely to blame them for not being able to get to Facebook, I think having a detailed "wasn't us" on their blog that their sales engineers can point to is reasonable.

which is that Cloudflare is the last company that should be criticizing everyone else

There is no criticism of Facebook in our blog post.

I kinda see your perspective; but I also mostly view them similarly to e.g. BackBlaze blogs - sure it can be viewed as taking smack about Samsung and Seagate drives failing, but I seem them as "things fail; what can we learn from it / here's our observations". And yes a little bit of self-advertising, but again, most tech blogs are, one way or another.

It just comes off as crass. Next time Cloudflare's CDN eats itself and starts vomiting up private customer data, Facebook can do a blogpost titled 'Understanding how Cloudflare exposed the private information of untold numbers of its customers'.

Sure they can. What’s CloudFlare going to do? Try to stop them?

Though I would expect something like this from Fastly more than Facebook.

Right, but as a consumer if that information, I might find that article equally interesting.

As someone who is always interested in learning new things, their blog post is informative and helpful. Not everything is about optics, their intentions are of no interest to me, because I got some value out of the content.

how are they 'interjecting' themselves? They run a massively popular dns service as well as many other sites, and they are simply reporting on what happened and why people who use their dns etc might have had outages. In addition to being a very detailed and well written article on the whole incident. Not really sure what you are driving at.

> Not really sure what you are driving at.

At the fact that they are presenting themselves as authorities on the incident, when they have no internal knowledge of what triggered the events, because they are not Facebook engineers. They provide an explanation of BGP that you can glean by reading virtually any other introductory explainer, and turn it into a chance to promote their own service.

>At the fact that they are presenting themselves as authorities on the incident, when they have no internal knowledge of what triggered the events, because they are not Facebook engineers. They provide an explanation of BGP that you can glean by reading virtually any other introductory explainer, and turn it into a chance to promote their own service.

This is not an honest representation of the article.

They talk about what their services observed related to bgp traffic from facebook. They are an authority on that.

They talk about their dns traffic changes from facebook's outage. They are an authority on that.

They talk about suspected causes, based on the observable data, and guess what, given they are who they are, this is something they are a subject matter expert on.

"we saw a spike in bgp traffic from facebook followed by a bunch of route withdrawals. we think this could be a bgp configuration issue [given we took large chunks of the internet down 2 years via the same fuckup]"

Is something in the subject matter wheelhouse of cloudflare, yes.

Ironically, I read this and thought "I like this and these people are doing the sort of things I like doing, maybe I should think about working with them if and when I need another job."

Sample size of 1, but I imagine that's more or less the reaction they're hoping for.

They talk about what their services observed related to bgp traffic from facebook. They are an authority on that.

They talk about their dns traffic changes from facebook's outage. They are an authority on that.

So ... cloudflare has inserted themselves far more deeply into the discussion awhile back.

With the new DoH Chrome setting turned on by default (DNS-over-HTTPS), AFAIK they are now the default resolver bypassing your network settings.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encrypted-dns/dns-...

[2] https://duo.com/decipher/google-makes-dns-over-https-default...

The whole blog post seemed like a click and bait to me.

Nothing is "explained" other than what we knew already, that some unlucky SOB shot themselves in the head with a BGP shotgun.

I understand, they have no way of knowing what happened inside Facebook. But they could give some detail about exactly what the BGP updates were, the structure of the IP space served etc.

No. I don’t mind at all. It’s a great marketing opportunity and they would be stupid not to take advantage of it.

Totally. Just like it's weird that more cigarette companies don't advertise outside schools.

Nobody ever died for using Cloudflare

That's kind of incredibly disrespectful to even compare the two

Not at all. It's interesting analysis. It's possible to bloviate in such a post but I don't see it here.

It’s massively viral news about the exact stuff they specialise in. I’m not too surprised that they’d be putting out content. After all, Facebook is hardly in a position to do so ;)

It's not surprising, no, but it is irritating because it's just crass marketing.

I thought of this at first, but after reading FB official "tech" explanation on the outage (https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/out...) I very much prefer Cloudflare's take on this.

I'dnt expect fb employees to write up about BGP while they are in middle of a fire drill.

or an actual fire?

They seem to be treating it as a marketing opportunity, as well as explaining these topics for journalists. If their post didn't add to the public conversation, it wouldn't have been so viral.

How'd you feel about Krebs' post about the outage?

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-faceboo...

Krebs did not promote a DNS service he works for a total of nine times in his blogpost, so I did not feel like I was reading an infomercial for how great Cloudflare's continued MITMing of the internet is.

No issue with his openly admitted speculating though? That seemed to be in-part your issue with Cloudflare in many comments, even though they were talking about something specific to its impact on their service.

I like having a knowledgeable 3rd party report. Keeps the 1st party honest.

Probably re-enabling it gradually to avoid hammering DNS servers too much due to client caches being totally cold

it's kinda their whole objective- to keep sites up and running. so of course they'll do commentaries- it's for marketing and helps stimulate discussions in their industry.

YES! THIS!

No surprises here. They do it all the time for websites they cdn. Cloudflare might as well be a marketing company for how much they puff about themselves.

Cloudflare is also incredibly dodgy with their billing practices which you wouldn't pick up from their marketing.

If you downgrade from a Paid to a Free account they automatically and silently add a paid add-on for 10 Page Rules.

They state that [1] this only happens if you are using more than 3 Page Rules that the free plan allows, which is fair. The alternative would be to randomly delete some of your page rules, which is worse:

> If you do not want to be charged for the additional page rules, you should ensure you only have 3 active rules before you downgrade from Pro to Free.

[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/i-canceled-my-subscriptio...

The alternative is to ask the user what they want to do instead of defaulting to billing you. Or provide the option of refunds.

And pretty sure that explanation is incorrect or has changed. I have never used Page Rules and was still billed.

> The alternative is to ask the user what they want to do

Fair point.

Cloudflare are also good at disappearing people from the Internet

I don't trust any analysis from CloudFlare. These are the same people preventing people with vpns or tor browsers from reaching sites while screaming and yelling OMG DDoS!! then blaming the customer of CloudFlare for not knowing how to configure it.

big +1 here

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