The most recent Cloudflare outage was a pretty big one. They followed up with an incident report really quickly, same day is impressive. At other places I have worked that operated quickly, even 24 hours was a stretch.
This post assumes you have read https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ already.
Overall the post is really good. Easy to understand at a high level, answers most of the questions behind it and doesn’t leave me scratching my head wondering what actually happened. This kind of post gives me confidence Cloudflare understands the issue in detail.
But the most interesting thing about this incident report isn’t in the report.
It’s in a hacker news comment from the cofounder and CEO on hacker news.
With the actual post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973709#45974320
It is really refreshing to see a cofounder and CEO so engaged on issues for one.
How many other execs write these reports?
For very large issues I think it is common for Sr leaders or executives to be involved in or write short blurbs in incident reports, but to be the point person on it is certainly interesting.
Could Cloudflare generate the same report in the same time window without Matthew?
From his post above clearly the organization worked together to generate this, but if Matthew was not available how differently would this report look. How deep does the culture around urgency and transparency of these reports go and would there be a proper champion? I’d have to guess yes, but I don’t work there.
Really impressive to see the behind the scenes of this as well.
Don’t use Cloudflare?
These kind of posts are ridiculous
https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-put-your-site-behind-cloudflare-if-you-dont
These posts remind me of when AWS has outages and people say you need to be multi region or multi cloud or need to stop using AWS. Most posts like this do not take into account the “hidden” cost of that.
Sophisticated large providers can likely do this better than you can, they likely have more specific niche staff dedicated to these problems. Dealing with DDoS yourself rather than dealing with a temporary outage is likely significantly more “costly”.
A stark reminder?
Search linkedin for cloudflare posts about this and you’ll see a bunch of posts from folks on the reminder that the internet is fragile and brittle. Or that folks should be doing XYZ from this.
Maybe this engagement is good. The similarity of these posts on this being a reminder to many people is maybe good? I dunno, there seems too many posts chasing clicks from outages.
I’m not posting this on linkedin.
Pete Shima 