[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Experiencing Latency Issues
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       Cloudflare Experiencing Latency Issues
        
       Author : z0a
       Score  : 115 points
       Date   : 2021-12-16 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cloudflarestatus.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cloudflarestatus.com)
        
       | lend000 wrote:
       | This impacted just about every API I regularly request for ~20
       | minutes, but it seems to be fixed now. Hopefully permanently.
        
       | yRetsyM wrote:
       | I'm impressed they've updated their status page so quickly,
       | unlike some of their cloud competitors
        
         | jgrahamc wrote:
         | It's part of our process. Here's the internal timeline
         | T+0 Automatic comms thread created         T+1 XXX Is this a
         | P0, do we need a status page?                 @YYY         T+1
         | YYY Eyes on         T+4 ZZZ Yes                 let's get
         | super-generic status page up                 @XXX / @YYY - you
         | have one handy?                 I see it now thx
        
           | ethbr0 wrote:
           | It's definitely a differentiator. _cough_
        
       | jgrahamc wrote:
       | Should be cleared up now. Sorry about that.
        
         | odiroot wrote:
         | I'm always surprised you have the time to respond in these
         | threads, jgrahamc.
        
           | jgrahamc wrote:
           | Good to let people know what's going on if I have time.
        
         | rexreed wrote:
         | Thanks for the post. Yesterday you strongly rebutted me for
         | saying that the widespread outages also were impacting
         | Cloudflare [0], even tho it wasn't obvious to me at that time
         | who was being impacted by who. Knowing the intricate
         | connections of all the app and infrastructure and cloud
         | providers is tricky! When stuff goes down, the blame gets
         | spread around.
         | 
         | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29568319
         | 
         | edit: changed "scolded" to "strongly rebutted"
        
           | jgrahamc wrote:
           | Sorry if that came across harshly. ASCII is a tough medium.
        
             | rexreed wrote:
             | Yes text is indeed devoid of context and sentiment. But to
             | the main point, I fear that the comments on tone are a bit
             | beside the point anyways. So let's move past that to talk
             | about what I really wanted to comment on.
             | 
             | To be direct - yesterday I spotted what seemed like an
             | Internet-wide issue that was also impacting Cloudflare. You
             | told me yesterday that no in fact, there was no impact on
             | Cloudflare. Today there is a post about a separate issue
             | where there is an impact on Cloudflare. In my mind I make
             | the connection between these two events, and on the one
             | hand the quick and direct denial of the issue being that of
             | Cloudflare on the first day, but today an acknowldgement of
             | issues, even if they were a different set of problems.
             | 
             | It would be helpful on outages where Cloudflare is showing
             | an outage when the problem doesn't originate with
             | Cloudflare to put on your own error page an indication of
             | where the error might be. I know this might be touchy to do
             | so, but you should feel free to point fingers when you know
             | that an outage to your client is caused by another party.
             | 
             | For example:
             | 
             | "Error. Cloudflare reports this site is down. Issues point
             | to an outage with [AWS, Google, Azure, Oracle <-- just
             | kidding] as being the source of that outage"
             | 
             | That would help make it clear that yes, there is an outage,
             | and no, Cloudlfare is not the proximal cause.
             | 
             | All this chatter about your use of words and my use of
             | words kinda misses the main point of what I was trying to
             | communicate.
        
               | jgrahamc wrote:
               | I think we may have done that in the past. I'll bring up
               | internally.
        
           | tailspin2019 wrote:
           | Unless the comment was edited, I don't think that was a
           | "scolding" :-)
        
             | rexreed wrote:
             | Probably my interpretation. I should have said "strong
             | rebuttal". Edited my comment above ;)
        
               | tailspin2019 wrote:
               | Maybe "corrected"?
        
           | eightysixfour wrote:
           | Is there a particular reason you perceived their response as
           | "scolding?" It just looks like a straightforward answer.
        
             | sneak wrote:
             | In my experience, a lot of Americans interpret direct, no-
             | wasted-word statements as aggressive or confrontational.
             | Euphemism and indirect implication is the norm in American
             | communication, much to my dismay.
             | 
             | It can wrap around to extremes sometimes, too.
             | 
             | https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | as a native, I can say this is absolutely true and also
               | horrible for productive communication. particularly the
               | pacific and mountain west is really rough.
               | 
               | Especially when discussing politics it can be confusing
               | as hell trying to figure out what somebody really
               | believes/wants because the tip toeing around egg shells
               | can make the words impossible to decode.
        
               | tailspin2019 wrote:
               | > a lot of Americans interpret direct, no-wasted-word
               | statements as aggressive or confrontational.
               | 
               | I think this can be said of the British too. Though we
               | would probably make the mistake of interpreting it as
               | _rude_ rather than _aggressive_. As someone who doesn 't
               | communicate particularly directly, I often make this
               | mistake myself.
               | 
               | Though I'm not sure which side of "the pond" is worse in
               | this respect.
        
               | Buttons840 wrote:
               | This reminds me of the younger generation sometimes
               | perceiving messages ending in a period as rude.
               | 
               | I'm also sometimes surprised by how effectively a simple
               | statement like "I don't want to spend money on that" can
               | shut down even a pushy salesman. Or even the simple "No."
               | can work wonders.
        
               | ziddoap wrote:
               | > _This reminds me of the younger generation sometimes
               | perceiving messages ending in a period as rude._
               | 
               | I've never seen any comments regarding a single period,
               | but I've seen comments (and sometimes agree with them)
               | regarding the perceived rudeness when ending messages in
               | ellipses.
               | 
               | "Good job..." seems almost sarcastic compared to "Good
               | job.".
        
               | rackjack wrote:
               | Language is so weird.
        
               | newsbinator wrote:
               | Right: ellipsis means to me either "but", "I don't really
               | mean what I've said", or "I'm quietly urging".
               | 
               | "Good job... but..."
               | 
               | "Good job... I guess..."
               | 
               | "We should probably get going... or else I won't make it
               | to the bathroom in time..."
        
               | sneak wrote:
               | Good job.
               | 
               | seems almost patronizing in comparison with
               | good job
               | 
               | Then again, I grew up on IRC.
        
               | rexreed wrote:
               | It's possible it's cultural. Sometimes strong, absolute
               | rebuttals come across as someone just trying to shut down
               | a conversation and deny. Other times a direct answer is
               | just a direct answer. The problem is that context and
               | tone are helpful here.
        
               | jedilord wrote:
               | This is a fair statement. Didn't use to be this way - I
               | blame the participation trophy era of kids.
        
               | sneak wrote:
               | You're engaging in it yourself right now by using
               | euphemism/implication to suggest a certain type of person
               | instead of just saying "whiny, overly sensitive children"
               | (which I assume is what you mean).
               | 
               | You should remove the plank from your own eye, first.
               | 
               | You don't get to blame others for your voluntarily chosen
               | courses of action.
        
               | novok wrote:
               | There is a difference between euphemism and idiom,
               | nicknames and handwave identifiers.
        
               | jedilord wrote:
               | You're fast! Good job. I present you with a trophy.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | tentacleuno wrote:
         | I really like it when people in your position at such a big
         | company post on here, even if it is a brief comment like this.
         | Thank you!
        
           | jgrahamc wrote:
           | I would have posted faster but I was too busy doing my own
           | little bit of debugging which consisted of
           | 1. dig @1.1.1.1 jgc.org         2. nc -v 104.22.11.223 80
           | 3. curl -v https://jgc.org/cdn-cgi/trace         4. curl -v
           | https://jgc.org/
           | 
           | Hmm #1 was fast so network is routing OK. Hmm #2 was fast so
           | TCP is OK. Hmm #3 was fast so I know (because I worked on
           | that code) that this code path is good. Hmm #4 is slow so
           | that means component X is slow but still working.
           | 
           | Of course, in parallel I'm in a conference call with about 40
           | other people who have actual access to monitoring and systems
           | and other things who can see exactly where things are.
           | 
           | But I was damn close with four commands and gave me
           | confidence in what people were saying. But, I have to say,
           | Cloudflare's internal distributed tracing system is pretty
           | cool because I got sent a trace and you could see right where
           | the slowdown was.
        
             | tailspin2019 wrote:
             | Now you're just showing off :)
        
               | jgrahamc wrote:
               | Allow an old man the fantasy that he still knows how the
               | whole of the system works.
        
             | stillicidious wrote:
             | I'm glad commenting on HN takes priority over notifying
             | your enterprise customers.
        
               | jgrahamc wrote:
               | We have whole teams of people to get status up and inform
               | people and support them.
        
               | stillicidious wrote:
               | And yet I'm learning about this outage from HN. How did
               | that happen?
        
               | tailspin2019 wrote:
               | Aviate Navigate Communicate.
               | 
               | They did all three of those in the space of a few minutes
               | (if you were checking their status page - which you can
               | subscribe to by the way).
        
               | scrollaway wrote:
               | Maybe it happened because you're busy commenting on HN
               | instead of checking their status page.
        
               | jgrahamc wrote:
               | Suggest subscribing on https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
               | as that was updated long before I came to HN to say
               | anything (which was only after the incident was
               | resolved).
        
       | jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
       | Better than being down down!
        
       | zertop wrote:
       | > Monitoring > Cloudflare has implemented a fix for this issue
       | and is currently monitoring the results. > Posted 1 minute ago.
       | Dec 16, 2021 - 20:44 UTC
       | 
       | Fast feedback, communication and fix. Always impressed with
       | them...
        
       | chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
       | CircleCI still very slow/returning 504s, not sure if related?
        
       | mrcnkoba wrote:
       | I would love if their customer service was so fast. They keep
       | ghosting us for 7 days. Poking the on a live chat results in "hey
       | we'll look at this".
       | 
       | Truly loving the service but we had to "unproxy" our website.
       | When it works, it brings so much value. I'm guessing our issue
       | isn't trivial to solve though.
        
         | jgrahamc wrote:
         | Email me (jgc) the ticket number.
        
       | amar0c wrote:
       | Is this Telia (1299) related maybe ?
        
       | spurgu wrote:
       | Yeah seems to apply to all the sites I've tried so far.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | tailspin2019 wrote:
       | All my sites running through Cloudflare Tunnel are very very
       | slow, but still just about online.
       | 
       | As a side note, I'll take this opportunity call out the superb
       | Checkmk monitoring system which alerted me to this. I don't see
       | Checkmk mentioned on HN that often...
       | 
       | https://checkmk.com
       | 
       | EDIT: Seems to be fixed. Good job!
        
         | marcolussetti wrote:
         | CheckMK offers pretty solid monitoring our of the box, but I
         | think it falls quite short of the mark when you want to add
         | more than the default monitoring. It's still probably the
         | easiest solution for monitoring a bunch of basic VMs, servers,
         | etc. You can set it up and get a solid idea of how it works in
         | only a few hours.
        
         | donmcronald wrote:
         | I don't think I'd use it even if they have a self-hosted
         | version. The way they set their pricing based on "number of
         | services" seems like the kind of tactic you use when you want
         | to intentionally make things confusing so you can extract as
         | much value as possible.
         | 
         | What happened to honest businesses with fair, easy to
         | understand pricing?
        
           | tailspin2019 wrote:
           | > What happened to honest businesses with fair, easy to
           | understand pricing?
           | 
           | Well in my case the pricing is very easy to understand. It's
           | free!
           | 
           | I only have < 25 hosts so I self-host the open source version
           | on a $5/month DigitalOcean instance (ironically also reverse
           | proxied through Cloudflare)
           | 
           | So I certainly don't think that's exactly dishonest or
           | unfair. It's been rock solid since I've used it. I don't know
           | how many services you'd need to monitor but the starting
           | prices for Standard and Enterprise seem pretty reasonable to
           | me?
           | 
           | It probably doesn't scale to a very large operation - but
           | then it's not really "cloud first" monitoring akin to
           | something like Prometheus, so perhaps their target audience
           | isn't really likely to have a huge number of services to
           | monitor.
        
       | gildedage77 wrote:
       | Maybe because they're powered by Clickhouse?
        
       | Jamie9912 wrote:
       | Seems to be a regional thing because i'm not experiencing any
       | issues with Cloudflare hosted things, reaching the SYD PoP
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-16 23:00 UTC)