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"Cloudflare is observing network performance issues." not just performance issues, our entire website is unavailable because of it.

edit: availability has been alternating between available and unavailable

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It's not their fault as accidents happen to everyone. You should be prepared for such a scenario and for many others too.

You are right, accidents happen to anyone. I cannot really be prepared for Cloudflare to go down though. What are my alternatives? Turn it off and route traffic to our servers directly? The DNS propagation takes longer than it just took for our website to be available again.

It shouldn't - Cloudflare keeps the TTL for their cache-enabled records very low (like 300 seconds).

If you just log in to Cloudflare and click the "orange cloud" icon on the DNS tab, which points the domain back directly to your origin, you'll see the site up within a couple minutes.

Is 300 very low? I've occasionally seen 60 in the wild.

It's very low compared to 24 hours, which is what used to be the most common setting and that (among other factors) was a big part of the "DNS propagation takes forever" mentality

Same here.

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