Is Cloudflare Still a Good Move for Business? A Candid Look at Outages, Risks, and Smarter Alternatives
For over a decade, Cloudflare has been considered the Internet’s armored shield — a quick, inexpensive way to make sites faster, safer, and more reliable. It became the default choice for businesses of all sizes.
But in recent years, something has changed.
Cloudflare outages are increasing.
Security incidents are happening more frequently.
Entire chunks of the Internet are going down at once.
And last night? It happened again.
This rising pattern has left many business owners and technical teams asking a tough, but necessary question:
“Is Cloudflare still a smart move for our business?”
Below is a candid, forward-thinking breakdown of what’s happening, why it matters, and how businesses should adapt.
Cloudflare’s Outage Trend: A Growing Concern
Every service has downtime. That’s normal.
But Cloudflare outages are not normal — they’re Internet-scale events.
Cloudflare’s architecture is designed for global speed, but that also means:
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A single bad rule
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A misconfigured WAF update
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A routing glitch
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A certificate issue
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A Zero Trust failure
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A failed global propagation
…can break millions of websites instantly.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen outages caused by:
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Faulty global configuration pushes
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Firewall policies taking down entire regions
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DNS failures
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Workers platform issues
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Authentication outages
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BGP and routing failures
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Automation accidentally deploying bad rules worldwide
Cloudflare’s greatest strength — massive centralization — has become a glaring weakness.
When Cloudflare stumbles, the Internet doesn’t wobble…
it face-plants.
Security Incidents Aren’t Helping
Cloudflare has also experienced a growing number of security and operational events, such as:
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Token and credential leaks
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Partner integration vulnerabilities
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Zero Trust authentication failures
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Certificate misdeployment
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Misconfigured caching exposing data
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WAF rules blocking legitimate traffic
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Systems pushed into infinite error loops
This doesn’t make Cloudflare “insecure.”
It makes them a high-impact infrastructure provider under growing strain.
When your network is this big, any slip multiplies.
Why Businesses Chose Cloudflare in the First Place
It’s important to acknowledge Cloudflare’s value:
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Excellent CDN caching
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Strong DDoS mitigation
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Fast DNS resolution
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Edge security tools
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SSL management
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Workers for serverless compute
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Bot protection
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Analytics
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Affordable or free plans
Cloudflare has historically offered massive value for the price.
That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is the reliability story — and the stakes.
The Hidden Problem: A Massive Single Point of Failure
Businesses don’t feel the pain of Cloudflare until an outage hits.
Then suddenly:
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Your site is down
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Your support portal is down
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Your login system is down
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Your mobile app calls fail
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Your APIs time out
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Your automations fail
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Your webhooks die
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Your voice and chat systems break
Your origin server could be humming along perfectly —
and none of your customers know, because Cloudflare is blocking every path to it.
This is the risk of depending on a single ultra-centralized vendor.
A Real-World Example: Cloudflare Went Down — Host Magi Didn’t
During the most recent Cloudflare outage — yes, the one this morning — large hosting companies, SaaS providers, and thousands of customer sites went completely offline.
Not because their servers failed.
Not because their code was bad.
Because Cloudflare created a global choke point.
But here’s the important part:
Host Magi and every single Host Magi client stayed online.
No downtime.
No disruption.
No “we’re investigating” banners.
Business as usual.
Why?
Because Host Magi’s infrastructure is built on resilience, not dependency:
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Redundant DNS (Cloudflare isn’t our only resolver)
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Multi-path routing
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Direct-origin accessibility, even if a CDN dies
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Zero reliance on Cloudflare Zero Trust for internal operations
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Backup delivery layers
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Independent uptime monitoring
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Isolation between routing, caching, and authentication layers
In other words:
Cloudflare had a rough morning. Our clients didn’t.
This is the difference between infrastructure that “usually works” and infrastructure designed to survive vendor outages.
Should Businesses Ditch Cloudflare Entirely?
No — Cloudflare still has tremendous value.
But should businesses rethink how they use Cloudflare?
Absolutely.
The goal isn’t abandonment.
The goal is reducing fragility.
Cloudflare should be a tool, not a foundation.
Where Cloudflare Still Shines
Cloudflare is still excellent when used strategically:
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Static asset caching
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DDoS protection
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CDN edge delivery
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Bot filtering
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Argo Smart Routing
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SSL
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Workers (lightweight logic, not core systems)
These strengths aren’t going away.
Where Cloudflare Has Become Risky
These areas are showing growing fragility:
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Relying on Cloudflare as your sole DNS provider
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Routing 100% of traffic solely through Cloudflare
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Building your core auth around Cloudflare Zero Trust
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Making Workers a mission-critical piece of your app
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Using Cloudflare as the only path to your origin
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Hard-tying APIs, webhooks, and voice systems into Cloudflare’s routing
If “Cloudflare goes down” = “your business goes down,”
that’s a strategic problem.
A Smarter, More Resilient Cloudflare Strategy
Here’s the modern approach businesses should adopt:
1. Always use secondary DNS
Cloudflare DNS should never stand alone.
Route 53, NS1, Bunny, or ClouDNS can save you during outages.
2. Don’t route everything through Cloudflare
Your origin must be reachable even if Cloudflare dies.
3. Avoid depending entirely on Zero Trust
Your internal access shouldn’t collapse with Cloudflare’s authentication layer.
4. Keep Workers optional, not mandatory
If Workers fail, your whole app shouldn’t.
5. Use external uptime monitoring
Never depend on Cloudflare to tell you Cloudflare is down.
6. Architect for graceful degradation
Slow is fine.
Offline is not.
This is the infrastructure philosophy Host Magi follows — and it’s why we stay online when others don’t.
Final Thoughts
Cloudflare is still a good move for business —
if you use it with intention.
The businesses that will thrive in 2025 and beyond aren’t the ones with the fanciest tools…
they’re the ones with the smartest architecture.
Cloudflare is powerful.
But power without redundancy is risk.
The right question isn’t:
“Should we use Cloudflare?”
It’s:
“Have we built our systems so Cloudflare can fail without taking us down?”
For Host Magi and our clients, the answer is yes — and this morning proved it.