15 Comments
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PIC's avatar

When you immediately realize that a world based on Digital Currency, Digital ID, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Bodies is probably not a good idea…

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Smoothpana's avatar

Thank you for the heads up.

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Sandy Fisher | M.E.T.A™  Coach's avatar

I had major issues this morning, couldn’t get back on Twitter for at least an hour. I thought my computer was compromised. Wondering if they installed something on the browsers.

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Paul Padmore's avatar

Thank you for sharing. I had this issue earlier today, It seems to have cleared up now.

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Raafeke 🇬🇾🇬🇩's avatar

Just noticed this, but it’s not stopping my writing! Check out my latest post on the new game Arc Raiders.

https://open.substack.com/pub/raafeke/p/arc-raiders-is-a-gamers-test-of-free?r=pdzt0&utm_medium=ios

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Matt Swider's avatar

Excellent quick reporting, Max!

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Declan Mercer's avatar

Wow… welcome to the internet in 2025 😅. One Cloudflare hiccup and suddenly half the web—including Substack, X, and even ChatGPT—goes dark. Makes you realize how fragile the whole thing really is, no matter how “big” or “distributed” these platforms claim to be.

Also, a “mysterious spike in traffic”? That’s the most 2025 explanation ever. Can’t wait for the post-mortem where we find out it was either a bot army or someone just accidentally broke the internet. Meanwhile, we’re all just staring at loading screens like it’s the ’90s again.

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Steve Toplis's avatar

I work for a company where they often roll out updates that causes no end of headaches for us engineers, and don’t get resolved until they roll back to the previous version.

Even Apple IOS 26.x has bugs that now stop me from sending text messages to multiple recipients.

These tech companies are desperate to release the latest updates without thorough testing, or rely on us to do their testing for them on a live update.

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Declan Mercer's avatar

Exactly, Steve. This is the core issue. We’ve built this digital world on the assumption that “it just works,” but no one’s really doing the stress tests that matter. Everyone’s chasing new features, faster deployments, hype metrics—while stability and user impact take a back seat.

What’s wild is how reliant we are on these platforms. A single outage, a minor update gone wrong, and entire workflows, communications, even economies get paused. Makes you wonder if decentralization and redundancy were just marketing buzzwords instead of actual priorities.

The bigger picture: we need systems designed with real-world fragility in mind, not just glossy release notes. Otherwise, the next “mysterious traffic spike” could be the one that actually breaks something critical.

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Strategy Master's avatar

Everything in life is centralized.

Even BTC

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Jack Lhasa's avatar

Keep seeing this, despite Substack being 100% up, all day long.

i dunno who’s feeling crippled out there, but this kind of outage should effect everyone equally. Kinda sounds like this cloudflare negative bounce isn’t a substack problem.

It’s not just that it’s up up all day, every check, but all my people are around. I don’t have any of those I interact with regularly disappearing.

🤷

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Margaret Cofer's avatar

Let me count the ways Cloudflare has blocked…

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Cheesy Mouse's avatar

Aren’t you happy that we have centralized… everything! I literally cringe seeing all the plugins, APIs and other crap hardcoded in people’s and businesses’ websites. Because your website’s fonts have come from Google, right? And this is just a tiny sliver of this moronic pyramid of idiocracy.

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Laura's avatar

Ok, let's get wild in our guesses about what's really going on here: I bet this "spike of unusual traffic" is coming from 3I/Atlas 🛸. Next? 🤣🤣

Thanks for the heads-up!!

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Jake Borchardt's avatar

I had isssues checking my profile and inbox and anything for my voice over job platform I utilize- Voices- I thought it was the platform itself "effing" with me, I thought it was ai bots keeping me from my work, i thought many things and wondered whats is going on!! I also had issues with another voice over job platform I utilize-Fiverr- A huge influx of spam/scam messaging. It was very obvious it was spam/scammers. I kept seeing a notification to "unblock" cloudfare- which i never blocked to begin with. I did nothing at the time these things were occurring except close my macbook and went for a walk wondering WTF! thanks for writing this up. I only saw it just now and when I saw Cloudfare I understood- your article helped this guys (my) nervous system today. Thanks

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