In November 2025, Downdetector, a service that monitors outages, experienced a significant issue when its own platform went down during a Cloudflare outage. This revealed a critical dependency on Cloudflare, despite Downdetector's design focusing on multi-region and multi-cloud resilience. Dhruv Arora, Senior Director of Engineering at Ookla, explained that while multi-cloud strategies often seem unnecessary, Downdetector must detect outages across different cloud providers, justifying its multi-cloud architecture. Downdetector relies on Cloudflare for several services, including DNS, content delivery, and bot protection. These features help keep costs down and ensure fast load times, especially during traffic spikes typical during outages. Removing Cloudflare would likely lead to increased costs and slower service without improving revenue, as the platform is free for users. Arora highlighted the complexities of building redundancy, noting that their small team would struggle to replicate Cloudflare's sophisticated bot protection. During the outage, Downdetector faced additional challenges, such as Cloudflare’s bot protection inadvertently blocking legitimate traffic. However, they managed to mitigate some impact by redirecting traffic, indicating that their infrastructure had some flexibility. They also recognized that improving their Infrastructure as Code practices could have expedited recovery.