Yes, Cloudflare went down on Monday. And we still put it in front of every client

The Monday half the internet wobbled

On Monday, June 22, around mid-morning, a lot of people sat staring at their screens with no clue what was going on. X wouldn't load. Neither would Reddit. Teams, Zoom, Discord, Canva, even Fortnite started failing almost in unison. For a few minutes it looked like «the whole internet» had broken. It wasn't the internet: it was Cloudflare, the layer a huge slice of global traffic flows through, having a rough moment.

And here comes the awkward question, the one any sharp client would throw at us: if even Cloudflare goes down, why do you put it in front of all your clients?

Short answer: because we still do it, without hesitation, and this very page you're reading sits behind it. The long answer, which is the one worth your time, is below. But first, let's be honest: yes, it happened. It was real and it was annoying. What almost nobody mentions is how rare it is, and how little it lasts next to everything it prevents the rest of the year.

What Cloudflare actually is, no smoke

Picture your website living on a server, somewhere physical. Until now, when someone typed your domain, their browser went straight to that server. If the server got overwhelmed, if someone attacked it, or if it sat far from the visitor, the problem was yours and it showed.

Cloudflare slots itself in the middle: between the visitor and your server. Technically it's a reverse proxy spread across hundreds of cities worldwide. A visit's journey becomes:

Visitor  →  Cloudflare (nearest city)  →  Your server

That simple «in the middle» position is what changes everything, because it lets Cloudflare do things before the request even reaches your machine. Let's go one by one: the plain-language benefit first, then how it's achieved.

1. Your site loads faster (from any country)

What your client notices: the site opens sooner, especially images, CSS and JavaScript. And it feels just as quick for someone in Valencia as for someone in Mexico.

How it's achieved: Cloudflare keeps a copy (cache) of your static files across its network of servers around the world (a CDN). When someone visits from South America, the request doesn't travel all the way to your server in Europe: they get the files from the Cloudflare node closest to them. Less distance, less waiting, less load on your server.

2. It shields you from attacks with zero effort on your part

What your client notices: nothing. And that's exactly the point. Bots, hacking attempts and floods of malicious traffic get stopped at the door.

How it's achieved: with everything flowing through Cloudflare, it filters before any of it reaches you. Its WAF (web application firewall) blocks known attack patterns —SQL injections, login break-in attempts, automated scans—. And its anti-DDoS layer soaks up those floods where thousands of machines try to topple your site at once: what would be lethal for your server is a drop in the ocean for Cloudflare's network.

3. It hides where your server lives

What your client notices: nothing directly, but they sleep better without knowing it.

How it's achieved: because the visitor talks to Cloudflare and not to your machine, your server's real IP stops being public. Anyone wanting to attack you no longer knows which door to knock on. And if we use Cloudflare Tunnel, your server doesn't even need to open ports to the outside world: it reaches out to Cloudflare, not the other way round. A huge attack surface that simply vanishes.

4. Instant DNS and free HTTPS

What your client notices: the browser's little padlock always there, no «expired certificate» scares, and domain changes that apply in seconds.

How it's achieved: Cloudflare runs the DNS (the address book that turns your domain into a location) on one of the fastest networks on the planet, and it issues and auto-renews the SSL/HTTPS certificate. Zero maintenance, zero forgetting, zero «we missed the renewal».

5. It saves you money on hosting

What your client notices: the bill. A smaller server holds up just as well.

How it's achieved: if Cloudflare serves a good chunk of your files straight from cache and filters out the junk traffic along the way, your server gets far less load. That means a more modest —and cheaper— machine delivers the performance that used to demand a bigger one.

And Monday? Let's talk about downtime

We're not going to sweep the outage under the rug: that kind of transparency is exactly how we work. Cloudflare, like every system in the world, fails now and then. The right question isn't «can it go down?» —everything can go down, including your bare server, your hosting provider or your own connection—. The question is what does the scorecard look like at year's end?

And the scorecard is overwhelming in its favour: a few minutes of trouble once in a blue moon, against entire months blocking attacks, speeding up every visit and keeping sites standing that, on their own, would have fallen a dozen times. Ditching Cloudflare over Monday's blip would be like selling the car because you got a flat tyre one day.

And even so, we don't blindly put everything in one basket: we set up the critical pieces so that, if Cloudflare ever stumbles, the essentials keep responding. Defending a tool doesn't mean papering over its faults; it means knowing it so well you know exactly where to lean on it and where to add a safety net.

Why every client, no exceptions

From a hairdresser's simple website to an online shop with hundreds of orders a day, all of them get the same base layer. Why not reserve it for the «big» ones?

• Because Cloudflare's entry plan is free and already includes cache, HTTPS, DNS and basic protection. No cost excuse.
• Because the small site is precisely the one that has no team behind it watching for attacks at three in the morning. Cloudflare stands that watch on its own.
• Because we want all our sites to be fast and secure by default, not just the ones that pay more.

We install it because it's what we'd put on ourselves

That's the acid test: we give you what we use. This site runs with Cloudflare in front, just like our clients'. It isn't a line item we tack on to pad the invoice; it's the first layer we set up the moment a project goes live, because it makes a good website also fast, protected and hard to knock down without the client ever having to think about it.

Did it wobble on a strange Monday? It did. And by Tuesday it was still, by a wide margin, the smartest thing you can place in front of a website. That's why we don't take it off. That's why we put it on everyone.