Cloudflare control plane outage port mortem

Well, I'm not surprised in the slightest. I didn't work on the Colo side -- I was in Managed Services, but our entire platform lived on top of the Colo stuff, so I had plenty of interaction with those folks. Flexential is a company that was created out of mergers/acquisitions between ViaWest and Peak10 (both big Colo companies, the former mostly West of the Mississippi and the latter mostly East), and INetU, a Managed Services company with its own datacenter footprint. After the mergers, the company culture went from one of the best I had ever been a part of (at INetU) to dismally bad. All of the good employees left and it seemed like they only hired numbnutses to replace them. Management is ineffective at best (toxic at worst), and routinely makes bad decisions. Most of the good things that happen to the company are due to either pure accidents that end up somehow leading to success (think: Mr. Magoo), or because the C-suite schmoozed some customer executive at a fancy steakhouse into giving them their business. Their profits have been very bad (if existent) for years and they pinch pennies wherever possible. Their infrastructure testing practices have gotten worse and worse as the good infrastructure people left the company and their replacements didn't know any better. So yeah, I'm not surprised at all that they fucked up this badly -- I'm actually more surprised that Cloudflare put their core of operations at a Flexential datacenter.