Misplaced Blame: The Muscle Memory of Internet Outages
Description
A four-panel meme using the 'Marge Simpson Krumping' format from The Simpsons. In the first panel, an alarmed Marge Simpson yells, 'Cloudflare, no!'. In the second panel, a small child, whose face is covered by the orange Cloudflare logo, looks up innocently and asks, 'What?'. In the third panel, Marge corrects herself with an embarrassed expression, saying, 'Sorry, force of habit,' while the child with the Cloudflare logo still looks on. In the final panel, Marge has correctly identified the source of the problem and yells with renewed alarm, 'Crowdstrike, no!'. This meme is a direct commentary on the massive global IT outage of July 19, 2024, which was caused by a faulty update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. For years, Cloudflare has been the usual suspect for large-scale internet disruptions, and the meme humorously plays on the IT community's ingrained habit of blaming them first. It perfectly captures the collective moment of realization when the tech world had to update its mental model of 'who breaks the internet'
Comments
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Our incident response runbook now has a new Step 0: 'Confirm it's not actually Cloudflare this time.' We're thinking of automating it with a shell script that just returns 'It was CrowdStrike.'
We finally automated incident triage: the Slack bot blurts “Definitely Cloudflare,” waits 90 seconds, edits to “Actually CrowdStrike,” and while everyone debates vendors, Terraform silently rolls back our own bad deploy
When you've been debugging CDN issues for so long that you instinctively blame Cloudflare for everything, but then remember it was actually CrowdStrike's kernel driver that took down half the Fortune 500's Windows fleet - the muscle memory of incident response dies hard
When you've been on-call through enough Cloudflare incidents that your muscle memory kicks in before your brain processes which vendor actually pushed the bad update this time. The real joke is that we've architected ourselves into a world where a handful of companies can accidentally BSOD half the planet's endpoints or take down a significant chunk of the internet - and we just shrug and add it to our incident retrospective template
Incident reflex: blame Cloudflare/DNS; 2024 taught us the edge can be fine while your EDR ships BSOD-as-a-service across the entire Windows fleet
When your muscle memory confuses zero-downtime CDNs with global-meltdown EDRs
Runbook step zero: before paging the CDN, check whether your EDR shipped a kernel driver in BSOD-as-a-service mode