Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern, hosted by Nathan Wrigley. In this episode Nathan speaks with Saumya Majumder, lead software engineer at BigScoots, about a recent major Cloudflare outage, how global infrastructure failures ripple across the web, and the WordPress performance and mitigation strategies BigScoots has developed — many built around deep Cloudflare Enterprise integration.
Saumya’s background and focus
Saumya specializes in high-performance WordPress engineering and Cloudflare-powered architectures. He builds large-scale systems including custom caching engines, migration tools, worker-based automations, and edge computing. At BigScoots he oversees enterprise customers, internal WordPress projects, plugins, and developer-friendly solutions aimed at speed, reliability, and scale.
How Cloudflare outages happen (and why they matter)
Saumya explains that Cloudflare is far more than a conventional CDN; it’s a complex platform with many interdependent systems. When a low-probability edge-case bug appears deep in the stack it can cascade into widespread disruption. Even companies with robust redundancy and review processes can miss rare interactions that trigger failures. Outages are expensive: enterprise SLAs can require significant credits when uptime targets are missed, so providers scramble to fix issues and limit impact.
Cloudflare’s transparency and learning
Saumya praises Cloudflare’s transparency. When outages happen Cloudflare publishes detailed postmortems explaining root causes and remediation steps. They also iterate to remove brittle dependencies (e.g., prior outages tied to external services or data center failures) so the same failure modes are less likely to recur. That said, zero failures is unrealistic for any large system.
BigScoots’ mitigation during the outage
BigScoots had an advantage: while many Cloudflare features (such as Turnstile authentication or Cloudflare-hosted apps) were impacted, BigScoots could still use Cloudflare’s API. They automated failovers that toggled Cloudflare proxying off for affected customer domains, routing traffic directly to BigScoots’ origin servers until Cloudflare stabilized. This reduced customer downtime for sites hosted on BigScoots but proxied through Cloudflare. Saumya notes that if you host entirely on Cloudflare Workers or Cloudflare Pages, the Cloudflare outage would be more disruptive because those services and their control planes were affected.
CDN-level page caching: what it is and why it matters
Saumya and a colleague pioneered CDN-level HTML page caching for WordPress long before it became common. Traditional server-side caching stored rendered HTML on the origin server; static assets might be served from a CDN, but HTML still required origin involvement. CDN-level page caching places HTML in the CDN edge, so users fetch fully rendered pages from an edge PoP near them. This reduces latency dramatically for global audiences and reduces origin load.
How Cloudflare Enterprise improves caching
Cloudflare Enterprise brings higher cache hit ratios and advanced tiered caching. In a tiered architecture, a local PoP first checks its cache, then queries an upper tier (within Cloudflare’s private backbone) before hitting the origin. This internal network (Cloudflare’s intranet) is faster and avoids public internet congestion. Higher cache hit ratios mean fewer origin fetches, more consistent low latency, and improved Core Web Vitals for users worldwide.
BigScoots Cache plugin and developer features
BigScoots built a proprietary plugin, BigScoots Cache, to tightly integrate WordPress with Cloudflare’s page caching. The plugin:
– Leverages Cloudflare Enterprise caching and tiering to maximize hit rates.
– Provides fine-grained cache controls and TTL tuning per page or content type.
– Implements intelligent purge logic: when content updates, it purges related pages (e.g., taxonomy and archive pages) automatically.
– Offers hooks and documentation for advanced users to customize cache behavior or integrate with external systems.
– Exposes a REST API for programmatic cache clearing, enabling integrations (e.g., backend systems, e-commerce flows) to purge caches on content changes.
Direct Cloudflare peering and CNI
BigScoots runs its own data centers and has invested in a private connection to Cloudflare (CNI). Rather than relying solely on the public internet for origin fetches, Cloudflare can fetch content from BigScoots over a private, high-bandwidth link. This reduces latency and improves reliability for origin pulls. Such direct peering requires physical data center control and isn’t feasible for hosts that only lease infrastructure from larger cloud providers.
Customer-facing controls and managed services
BigScoots exposes many Cloudflare Enterprise controls in its portal with fine-grain toggles for performance, security, and access control:
– Block or challenge traffic by country/continent.
– Hardening and bot management options.
– Image optimization and speed-related toggles.
– Login protection and WAF settings.
These settings are designed to be accessible for non-technical users while offering hooks and APIs for advanced customers and agencies. BigScoots also provides managed support, onboarding, zero-downtime migrations, performance optimizations, and bespoke engineering for enterprise and agency clients.
Audience and use cases
While BigScoots serves “mom-and-pop” sites, these Enterprise features and the BigScoots Cache plugin are especially valuable for agencies and enterprise customers with many sites, high traffic, or strict uptime and performance requirements. Saumya emphasizes that many smaller customers still benefit from easy toggles (e.g., blocking traffic from a problematic country) without needing deep technical knowledge.
Final notes
Saumya reiterates that complexity is inherent in large internet services and that outages, while serious, are part of operating at scale. Cloudflare’s transparent handling and continuous improvements are positive signs. BigScoots focuses on combining deep Cloudflare integration, private peering, intelligent caching, and managed support to reduce downtime, improve speed, and give customers control.
For more information and links mentioned in the episode, visit wptavern.com/podcast and search for the episode with Saumya Majumder.
