TL;DR
A website owner in Southeast Asia describes frequent Cloudflare security prompts and regional CDN problems that degrade browsing. A May 13 maintenance event that affected nearby nodes reportedly caused hours of broken pages and slower connections for users in the region.
What happened
The author, who has used Cloudflare for multiple sites, outlines a pattern of negative experiences for users outside wealthy regions. They say Cloudflare’s security settings can trigger reCAPTCHA or outright blocks for traffic coming from particular IP ranges, countries, blacklists or behavioral signals; this creates repeated friction when visiting many Cloudflare-protected sites. The author reports encountering these prompts across dozens of local ISPs and on mobile networks, and after testing over 500 addresses from IP blocks they co-own, found the problem widespread. Separately, the uneven distribution of Cloudflare’s data centers became an issue during scheduled maintenance on May 13: two nearby nodes in Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi were taken down and, according to the author, traffic was rerouted to distant nodes, producing higher latency and failures to load static assets. That disruption is described as lasting roughly four to five hours and affecting sites including Reddit and StackExchange.
Why it matters
- Users in regions with fewer Cloudflare nodes may face more security prompts and slower load times.
- Widespread adoption of a single provider amplifies the impact of configuration and infrastructure changes.
- Captcha-based security can create ongoing friction for routine web browsing, especially when many sites use the same provider.
- Rerouting traffic to distant nodes can negate the performance benefits expected from a CDN.
- Free service tiers and aggressive integration with low-cost hosts can lead to broad, hard-to-avoid exposure to these effects.
Key facts
- Cloudflare bundles CDN, DNS, basic DDoS protection and other security features and offers a free tier.
- The author has used Cloudflare for at least two websites prior to these issues.
- Cloudflare operates multiple datacenters, noted by the author as concentrated in the USA, Canada, Europe and China.
- Cloudflare security settings can prompt visitors for reCAPTCHA or block them based on IP blocks, country, blacklists or behavioral signals.
- The author reports frequent reCAPTCHA prompts when arriving at some sites via search results, but not when visiting those sites directly.
- The author co-owns an ISP with four /22 IP blocks (about 4,096 addresses) and tested roughly 500+ IPs that all encountered captcha prompts.
- On May 13, scheduled maintenance on Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi Cloudflare nodes reportedly caused about four to five hours of disruption, with static files failing to load on some sites.
- The author asserts that Cloudflare node distribution is uneven, which can lead to traffic being routed to much more distant nodes and increased latency.
- The free tier does not, according to the author, protect against complex DDoS attacks.
What to watch next
- Whether Cloudflare publishes details or an official postmortem about the May 13 maintenance and its regional effects — not confirmed in the source.
- Whether site owners serving users in underrepresented regions will change configurations or move away from Cloudflare — not confirmed in the source.
- Whether Cloudflare adjusts node placement or routing behavior to reduce latency for affected regions — not confirmed in the source.
Quick glossary
- Cloudflare: A company that provides services such as content delivery, DNS, and basic DDoS protection, often used to accelerate and shield websites.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network): A distributed network of servers that delivers cached content to users from locations closer to them to reduce latency.
- DNS (Domain Name System): The system that translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses that computers use to route traffic.
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): An attack that aims to overwhelm a target with traffic from many sources to disrupt service availability.
- reCAPTCHA: A challenge-response test used to distinguish human users from automated bots, often presented as a checkbox or image task.
Reader FAQ
Does Cloudflare block users automatically?
According to the author, Cloudflare can block or present reCAPTCHA to visitors based on IP blocks, country, blacklists or detected behavior.
Did the May 13 incident affect major sites?
The author reports that sites such as Reddit and StackExchange experienced broken pages or missing static files during the outage, lasting roughly four to five hours.
Is this issue limited to the author’s IP addresses?
The author says the problem appeared across many ISPs and mobile networks in their country and on several hundred tested IPs they co-own.
Does Cloudflare’s free tier stop all DDoS attacks?
The author states the free tier does not protect against complex DDoS attacks.
SG ARCHIVE ABOUT CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me) Published in: Rant Follow up: Cloudflare: Making the internet a little bit faster – for a select group of people…
Sources
- CloudFlare is ruining the internet (for me)
- Russian Internet users are unable to access the open Internet
- Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet
- Cloudflare problems hit websites around the world
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