On the WP Tavern Jukebox Podcast, Nathan Wrigley spoke with Saumya Majumder, lead software engineer at BigScoots, about a recent major Cloudflare outage and how BigScoots uses advanced Cloudflare-powered architectures to improve WordPress performance and reliability.
Who Saumya Majumder is
Saumya leads high-performance WordPress engineering at BigScoots. He builds large-scale systems—custom caching engines, migration tooling, worker automations, and edge computing solutions—and supports enterprise customers, plugins, and developer-friendly hosting offerings.
How he started with CDNs and caching
Saumya’s interest began in college tinkering with PHP and early WordPress. Noticing latency when visitors were far from origin servers, he and a collaborator created one of the early CDN-level page-caching solutions (Super Page Cache for Cloudflare). The idea was simple but powerful: instead of only caching static assets at a CDN, cache full HTML pages at CDN points-of-presence (PoPs) so visitors receive responses from a nearby node instead of a distant origin.
What happened during the Cloudflare outage and why it matters
Saumya emphasizes that modern internet platforms are extremely complex. Cloudflare is more than a CDN—it’s a large, multi-layered platform with many interdependent systems. That complexity means even rare edge-case bugs or misconfigurations can cascade into significant outages. In the recent incident, initial diagnostics were misleading because some symptoms resembled a DDoS; propagation effects across Cloudflare’s global control plane then extended recovery time. Fixing the root cause and safely propagating changes across thousands of PoPs takes time, particularly when client traffic surges during recovery.
He also notes outages are inevitable at scale—across Cloudflare, AWS, Google, Azure, and other major providers. What sets providers apart is how they respond: detailed postmortems, clear communication, and work to remove fragile dependencies or harden systems. Cloudflare’s documented post-incident analyses and transparency were highlighted as useful practices.
How BigScoots mitigated the outage for customers
BigScoots runs Cloudflare as a reverse proxy and uses its API extensively. During the outage, because the Cloudflare API remained reachable, BigScoots programmatically turned proxying off for affected sites so traffic went directly to BigScoots origins. That quick switch reduced downtime for customers whose origins could handle direct traffic. This workaround is effective for traditional WordPress sites proxied through Cloudflare; sites built entirely on Cloudflare-hosted products (Workers, Pages, etc.) couldn’t use that approach.
CDN-level page caching and what Cloudflare Enterprise adds
Saumya walks through the evolution from server-side cache files and local page caches to CDNs serving static assets and then full HTML pages. Caching full HTML at the CDN level greatly reduces latency because the response can be returned from a nearby PoP instead of a central origin.
Cloudflare Enterprise adds features that improve cache hit ratios and control:
– Tiered caching: PoPs consult upstream tier nodes within Cloudflare’s private network before going to origin. Many requests are satisfied internally, reducing origin load and improving latency.
– Regional/global cache strategies: Enterprise plans allow better long-term caching behavior and finer control over how content is stored and refreshed.
– Private backbone and many PoPs: Cloudflare’s internal backbone and broad PoP footprint make cross-region fetches fast and efficient, increasing the practical benefit of CDN HTML caching.
BigScoots Cache plugin and integration
To integrate deeply with Cloudflare Enterprise, BigScoots built BigScoots Cache. Key capabilities include:
– Fine-grained control: Set CDN cache TTLs, tailor cache rules, and tune behavior per site.
– Smart purge logic: When a post is published or updated, the plugin purges not only the single URL but related pages—taxonomies, archives, author pages—preventing stale content across linked pages.
– Hooks and extensibility: Actions and filters let developers customize caching logic (for example, clearing caches for pseudo-archive pages produced by shortcodes).
– REST API: External systems—headless backends, e-commerce platforms, or automation—can programmatically purge or manipulate cache.
– Managed support: For customers who don’t want to manage hooks and settings, BigScoots offers implementation help, custom cache-clearing logic, and migration assistance.
Portal controls and user-facing features
BigScoots exposes Cloudflare Enterprise controls in its client portal so customers can use strong features without needing Cloudflare expertise. Examples:
– Toggle protections for login pages and apply DDoS/bot mitigations.
– Enable BigScoots’ hardening and speed optimizations.
– Configure image optimization, Rocket Loader, and other performance options.
– Block or challenge traffic by country or continent, and combine block/challenge rules.
– Block bad bots or AI scrapers and manage WAF/challenge settings.
These controls are designed to be simple for non-technical users (pick a country and click) while remaining extensible for agencies and developers through hooks and APIs.
Direct interconnect (CNI) and private backbone links
BigScoots operates its own data centers and maintains direct physical interconnects with Cloudflare, often called CNI. These private optical-fiber links let Cloudflare fetch content from BigScoots origins over a dedicated channel rather than the public internet, reducing latency and increasing reliability. Not all hosts can do this—providers that run on leased public-cloud infrastructure typically don’t have the physical control required to create private links.
Benefits for WordPress sites
Combining BigScoots with Cloudflare Enterprise delivers:
– Faster page loads and improved Core Web Vitals through CDN HTML caching and tiered caching behavior.
– Lower origin load and better scalability due to higher cache hit ratios.
– DDoS protection, bot mitigation, and country-level access control.
– Developer tools—hooks, APIs, and extensibility—for custom cache workflows and integrations.
– Managed onboarding and migrations for enterprise or agency customers, including zero-downtime migrations and performance tuning.
Who benefits most
Small sites can gain meaningful improvements from simple portal toggles, but the depth of customization—hooks, REST API, tiered caching, and private interconnects—most strongly benefits agencies and enterprise customers that need fine-grained control, high performance, and managed services.
Conclusion
The Cloudflare outage underlined that even the most sophisticated internet platforms can fail under rare conditions. What matters is how providers and hosts respond. BigScoots combines tight Cloudflare integration, in-house caching tech, private interconnects, and managed services to reduce downtime and maximize WordPress performance, offering both simple user-facing controls and deep technical options for power users and enterprises.
