Saumya Majumder, lead software engineer at BigScoots, discusses a recent large Cloudflare outage, why these failures occur, and how BigScoots combines Cloudflare Enterprise with its own engineering to keep WordPress sites fast and available.
Role and background
Saumya focuses on high-performance WordPress architectures that run at the edge. He builds custom cache engines, migration and automation tools, worker-based solutions, and developer-focused integrations. Early in his career he created Super Page Cache for Cloudflare, one of the first CDN-level full-HTML caching systems, which moved whole-page cache to the edge to cut latency for global visitors.
What caused the Cloudflare outage
Cloudflare is a complex platform made up of many tightly linked subsystems. Saumya explains that a seemingly small, low-probability issue in one critical component can cascade quickly across thousands of points-of-presence (PoPs). In the recent incident an unexpectedly large configuration file propagated through the network and resembled a DDoS to Cloudflare’s detection systems, which initially steered investigation in the wrong direction. Because fixes and configuration changes must sync across a massive, global footprint, stabilization can take hours as traffic patterns change and patches propagate.
He emphasizes that outages are possible at any major provider—Cloudflare, AWS, GCP, Azure—and operators treat them very seriously because of SLAs and reputational risk. One of Cloudflare’s strengths is transparency: detailed postmortems that identify root causes and mitigation steps. They also work to remove single points of failure, for example replacing external dependencies used for key services.
How BigScoots protected customers during the outage
Because BigScoots runs its own infrastructure and integrates with Cloudflare, they were able to use Cloudflare’s API to switch proxying behavior when the outage began. For affected domains BigScoots toggled the Cloudflare proxy off via API so traffic flowed straight to origin servers, keeping sites reachable even while parts of Cloudflare were degraded. That method works for sites where Cloudflare is a proxy in front of an external origin; it cannot protect sites hosted entirely on Cloudflare Workers or Pages, which rely entirely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
CDN-level HTML caching and BigScoots Cache
Traditional WordPress caching kept full HTML on the origin and left CDNs to serve static assets. Moving full-page HTML to the CDN means visitors can receive complete responses from a nearby PoP, lowering latency dramatically. Cloudflare Enterprise’s tiered caching improves cache-hit ratios by having lower-tier PoPs query upper-tier PoPs over Cloudflare’s private network before falling back to origin. Enterprise plans also allow longer cache retention and region-aware optimizations that increase hit rates compared with basic plans.
BigScoots built BigScoots Cache, a plugin and API that tightly integrates with Cloudflare Enterprise to:
– Use CDN-level HTML caching for high hit rates.
– Perform intelligent purges: updating a post triggers purges of related pages (taxonomies, archives, author pages) rather than just the single URL.
– Provide hooks and filters for custom logic (TTL overrides, special handling for shortcode-driven pages).
– Expose a REST API for programmatic cache control for headless or external applications.
Portal controls and managed options
BigScoots surfaces granular Cloudflare Enterprise controls in its portal so non-technical users can toggle useful features and admins can apply detailed policies. Options include country/continent blocking and challenges, image optimization, Rocket Loader, WAF and login protection toggles, bot and AI-bot defenses, and proprietary hardening beyond Cloudflare defaults. The UI aims to be simple for common tasks while still letting advanced users and agencies fine-tune behavior. BigScoots also provides managed support and custom implementations for clients that need bespoke purge rules or performance tuning.
Private backbone peering (CNI)
Rather than relying solely on leased cloud VMs, BigScoots operates its own data centers and private cloud infrastructure and has built direct physical connections—private optical links—to Cloudflare (CNI). With these private links, Cloudflare can fetch content over BigScoots’ backbone instead of the public internet, reducing latency and avoiding public congestion. This direct peering is a significant performance advantage but requires owning or colocating physical infrastructure.
Who benefits and operational philosophy
BigScoots’ advanced caching, deep Cloudflare Enterprise integration, and managed services appeal especially to agencies and enterprise sites that need predictable performance and fine-grained cache control. Smaller customers also benefit from simple portal toggles and BigScoots’ managed responses to traffic spikes and abusive bots.
Saumya underscores that engineering is iterative: edge caching, login-user strategies, and other features often take years of R&D. BigScoots prioritizes automation (API-driven failovers), transparent reporting, and managed services for clients who don’t want to handle low-level operational details. He also praises Cloudflare’s transparency and ongoing efforts to eliminate single points of failure.
Summary
Large providers will experience outages; complexity and rare edge cases make perfect uptime impossible. Effective responses are rapid mitigation, clear communication, and architectural fixes to prevent repeats. BigScoots mitigates third-party failures by combining origin control, automation (API proxy toggles), proprietary cache integrations, private backbone peering, and a set of user-facing controls and managed services built around Cloudflare Enterprise to maximize WordPress reliability and performance.