Saumya Majumder, lead software engineer at BigScoots, joined the Jukebox Podcast to describe a recent large Cloudflare outage and how BigScoots builds high-performance WordPress hosting using Cloudflare Enterprise. Saumya focuses on edge computing, worker-based automations, custom caching engines, and migration tooling, and he leads platform work for enterprise customers.
Why outages happen
Large internet platforms are extremely complex and composed of many interdependent layers. Saumya explains that even rare, subtle edge cases in lower-level components can cascade and cause broad service disruptions, despite testing and reviews. Any major provider — Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — can experience outages. These events are expensive in reputation and service credits, so providers investigate, publish postmortems, and work to remove single points of failure.
Cloudflare scale and response
Cloudflare is more than a CDN: it is a global developer platform offering security, networking, and serverless features. Because its control plane and edge network are so large and geographically distributed, fixes and configuration changes must propagate broadly and can create temporary ripples as state and traffic stabilize. Saumya praises Cloudflare’s transparency in publishing postmortems and highlights ongoing efforts to reduce systemic dependencies.
How BigScoots mitigated the outage
During the outage, public services like Turnstile and many high-profile sites were affected. BigScoots had automated tooling that used Cloudflare’s API to disable the Cloudflare proxy for impacted customers, routing traffic directly to BigScoots origins until Cloudflare recovered. Because the Cloudflare API remained available, this failover reduced end-user downtime for proxy-based sites. Saumya notes the limitation: sites fully built on Cloudflare Workers or with Cloudflare as origin would be affected differently.
Evolution of CDN-level page caching
Saumya traces WordPress caching history from server-side HTML caches to moving static assets to CDNs. He and collaborators helped pioneer CDN-level HTML page caching to serve full HTML from the PoP closest to the visitor, skipping round-trips to remote origins and greatly reducing latency. This approach is the foundation of many modern high-performance WordPress architectures.
Cloudflare Enterprise features and tiered caching
Cloudflare Enterprise enables advanced caching strategies: higher cache-hit ratios, longer TTLs, and regional tiered caching. Tiered caching arranges PoPs into a hierarchy so that a nearby PoP consults upper tiers over Cloudflare’s private backbone before ever contacting the origin. That private intranet is faster and reduces origin load and global response times.
Private connectivity (CNI)
BigScoots runs its own datacenters and maintains direct physical connections into Cloudflare’s network via Cloudflare Network Interconnect. Instead of Cloudflare fetching assets over the public Internet, it can pull content over private fiber straight to BigScoots origins. That reduces latency for cache misses and improves reliability compared with public peering paths.
BigScoots Cache plugin and platform controls
BigScoots built a proprietary plugin that integrates tightly with Cloudflare Enterprise and exposes controls for customers and developers. Key capabilities include:
– Intelligent purge logic that clears updated pages and related content automatically
– Hooks and a REST API so teams can customize TTLs and purge behavior or trigger cache clears from external systems
– Managed services: BigScoots implements custom snippets and purge workflows for customers who prefer hands-off operation
– Portal toggles for Enterprise features such as WAF, image optimization, bot controls, geo-blocking, and security rules
Who benefits
While the platform offers enterprise-grade features for agencies and large sites, smaller site owners also benefit. Simple portal controls and managed onboarding let less-technical customers use advanced caching and security without deep configuration. BigScoots aims for zero-downtime migrations and performance tuning as part of managed plans.
Operational mindset and trade-offs
Saumya emphasizes engineering trade-offs: it is unrealistic to design around every micro-edge case. Providers prioritize mitigations and, when outages occur, remove root causes to reduce recurrence. The objective is to minimize impact, be transparent, and continuously improve.
Conclusion
The episode shows how global infrastructure failures can propagate across the web, why Cloudflare’s scale affects both impact and remediation complexity, and how deep Cloudflare Enterprise integration, private networking, and CDN-level HTML caching can materially reduce latency and improve reliability for WordPress sites. Saumya highlights transparency, iterative improvement, and managed support as keys to helping customers at any scale. For the podcast and related links, search for the episode on wptavern.com.