Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On 2025-11-18 at 11:48 UTC, Cloudflare declared an incident affecting the global network (that also affected OnlineOrNot). OnlineOrNot monitors websites, APIs, web apps, and cron jobs, while providing status pages as well. While we partially mitigated the issue by enabling a fallback to AWS-based monitoring, between 13:00 UTC and 14:33 UTC failing checks went unreported, heartbeat checks over-reported, and status pages were unavailable.

Yesterday’s widespread Cloudflare outage reminds us how crucial external dependencies are to the stability of our own applications. When a key edge provider like Cloudflare goes down, the impact on your internal monitoring systems can look like a catastrophic, internal system failure triggering a massive storm of alerts and sending engineering teams into frantic, misdirected debugging sessions.

As major incidents like AWS’s October 2025 outage illustrate, modern systems are immensely interconnected. A failure in one can lead to a cascade of downstream problems. In this case, issues with DNS resolution for DynamoDB led to widespread disruptions with other AWS services and, subsequently, thousands of applications and services that rely on that infrastructure.

Cloudflare-like outages can cost your business a significant amount of money. This week’s Cloudflare global outage is a wake-up call for business resilience. You can stay resilient against such outages by regularly performing resilience testing and updating your application or infrastructure configurations.

The cloud has long promised limitless scalability and near-perfect uptime. But if you tried to access your Microsoft 365 dashboard or recline your smart bed last week, and got nothing but a spinning icon, you weren’t alone. In the span of 10 days, both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud suffered widespread outages that rippled across industries.

Another day, another massive Internet disruption, and this time it’s Cloudflare taking huge parts of the Internet offline. This incident is not an anomaly. It is part of a recurring pattern that has become standard in digital infrastructure. We have reached an inflection point in digital operations. Outages at major cloud and content delivery network (CDN) providers are now expected. The only real uncertainty is when it will happen next.

When your team shares one support number, someone has to decide who gets the calls when customers need help after hours. And if your team rotates on-call responsibilities weekly, which is common in IT (SRE, DevOps, ITOps, etc), clinical and field engineering teams, you’ve probably relied on manual call forwarding at some point. On paper, it seems straightforward: update the forwarding number each week to point to the person who’s on call. In practice? It often turns into a scramble.

On October 29th, 2025, Azure Front Door suffered an outage that impacted Microsoft services on a global level, including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, Copilot, and more. It also affected Microsoft Azure, meaning companies like Costco, Starbucks, and Alaska Airlines ran into issues for both customer-facing and internal systems. The root of the issue was a misconfiguration in the data plane for Azure Front Door and the Azure Content Delivery Network.