What are customers going to do? Go to competitor that's also down?
It is extremely annoying, will ruin your day, but as movie quote goes - if everyone is special, no one is.
But if a restaurant loses access to its POS system (which has happened), or you’re unable to purchase a train ticket, the consequences are very real. Outages like these have tangible impacts on everyday life. That’s why there’s definitely room for competitors who can offer reliable backup strategies to keep services running.
Using a different, smaller cloud provider doesn't improve reliability (likely makes it worse) if the architecture itself wrong.
Payment processor being down is payment processor being down.
From a societal level, having everything shut down at once is an issue. But if you only have one POS system targeting only one backend URL (and that backend has to be online for the POS to work) then cloudflare seems like one of the best choices
If the uptime provided by cloudflare isn't enough then the solution isn't a cloudflare competitor, it's the ability to operate offline (which many POS have, including for card purchases) or at least multiple backends with different DNS, CDN, server location etc.
those things shouldn't be fully tied to the internet/intranet anyways.
We got an extremely angry email about it.
Their infrastructure went down for a pretty good reason (let the one who has never caused that kind of error cast the first stone) and was brought back within a reasonable time.
What? Since when has anyone ever been free to just up and stop paying for power from the grid? Are you going to pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have another power company install lines? Do you even have another power company in the area? State? Country? Do you even have permission for that to happen near your building? Any building?
The same is true for internet service, although personally I'd gladly pay $10,000 - $100,000 to have literally anything else at my location, but there are no proper other wired providers and I'll die before I ever install any sort of cellular router. Also this is a rented apartment so I'm fucked even if there were competition, although I plan to buy a house in a year or two.
ok how do I punish cloudflare -- build my own globally-distributed content-delivery network just for myself so that I can be "decentralized"?
Or should I go to one of their even-larger competitors like AWS or GCP?
What exactly do you propose?
You need to be punishing the services you "paid" to use, but had downtime. So did you terminate any of those services for downtime, or had any sort of punishment done to them as a result?
If I wanted 100.00000% uptime, I would have to pay much more, but I don't want to
Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable.
So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.