On Thursday, June 12th, Cloudflare experienced a significant global outage that disrupted key services like Workers KV, WARP, Access, Gateway, Images, Stream, Workers AI, Turnstile and Challenges, AutoRAG, Zaraz, and parts of the Cloudflare Dashboard according to Cloudflare’s official blog. Although the outage lasted only 2 hours and 28 minutes, it had a massive impact on users who heavily depend on Cloudflare’s services, including DNS to keep their websites and applications online.

Cloudflare’s blog provided a sincere and honest breakdown on how the outage originated from Google Cloud, which they use as a third-party vendor. While very detailed and technical, a noticeable key piece missing from Cloudflare’s “Remediation and follow-up steps” section: There was no offer to compensate users for the devastating inconvenience they experienced during the downtime. Instead, it focused mostly on promises to improve for “next time”.

Why DNS Downtime Is More Than Just a Temporary Inconvenience

Even though the outage lasted a little under two and a half hours, outages can cause both short-term and long-term problems. Beyond immediate financial losses, downtimes like these impact customer trust, reduce marketing ROI, and create opportunities for competitors to capture your audience, damaging your brand in the long run.

And yet, this is not a new issue: Throughout the years, we’ve seen countless DNS outages and data breaches from large DNS service providers:

• GoDaddy December 2022, The web hosting and domain registration company suffered a significant security breach that affected a large number of its customers. The breach was discovered after several customers reported that their websites were being used to redirect to random domains, and subsequent investigations revealed that hackers had gained unauthorized access to GoDaddy’s systems.
• Oracle/Dyn February 2023, the multinational technology company experienced a massive DNS outage that lasted over several days.
• Amazon/Ring May 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint that Ring employees and contractors, or “bad actors” according to Ring, were able to access private video footage of their customers, including from indoor cameras. According to the FTC, what was most disturbing was that Ring failed to implement basic key security measures. Apparently, the footage was taken to train algorithms, among other purposes, but they did so without customer consent. The result is a settlement where the FTC must refund a total of $5.6 million to customers whose privacy was breached.
• Cloudflare February 2024, cybercriminals were able to access Cloudflare’s internal system relatively undetected between October to November in 2023.

And while apologies and promises of “doing better” seem like the bare minimum, these incidents also remind us: your DNS provider shouldn’t be a single point of failure.

Stay Online with Redundant DNS from No-IP

At No-IP, we believe that uptime and reliability are non-negotiable for you and your business. So, here are two robust DNS solutions to help safeguard your online presence (even when others fail):

No-IP Plus Managed DNS

 A rock-solid primary DNS solution backed by a global anycast network and top-tier performance. But don’t just take our word for it: DNSPerf says No-IP consistently ranks among the fastest DNS providers in the world.

No-IP Squared Backup DNS

Already using another DNS provider? No-IP Squared is the perfect secondary DNS option. It keeps your domain online by answering queries if your primary DNS goes offline, protecting you from outages like the one Cloudflare just had.

What Powers No-IP’s DNS Reliability?

Some of the key features of No-IP’s DNS infrastructure include:

Anycast Network Routing

No-IP uses Anycast Network routing to automatically route DNS queries to the nearest data center, ensuring low latency and fast response times.

Global Network of Data Centers

With over 100 data centers located around the world, No-IP’s DNS infrastructure provides high availability and reliability.

DNS Failover

No-IP’s DNS failover feature can automatically redirect traffic to a backup server in the event of an outage or server failure. This is one of No-IP’s proudest features, and something that may have been useful on June 12th.

Don’t Wait for Another Outage to Take Action

So what have we learned? If redundancy and uptime are critical to your business or project, now is a good time to evaluate your DNS setup.

Protect your business with No-IP’s proven DNS infrastructure. Explore Solutions here.