Nathan Wrigley hosts a Jukebox Podcast episode with Saumya Majumder, lead software engineer at BigScoots, about a recent major Cloudflare outage, how such failures cascade across the web, and the performance and mitigation strategies BigScoots uses for WordPress customers — many built around deep Cloudflare Enterprise integration.
Saumya’s focus and role
Saumya specializes in high-performance WordPress engineering and Cloudflare-powered architectures. He builds large-scale systems including custom caching engines, migration tools, worker automations, and edge solutions. At BigScoots he supports enterprise customers, maintains internal WordPress projects and plugins, and develops developer-friendly tools that prioritize speed, reliability, and scale.
How Cloudflare outages occur and why they matter
Cloudflare is more than a simple CDN; it’s a complex platform of interdependent systems. A rare, low-probability bug deep in the stack can cascade, producing broad outages. Even organizations with strong redundancy and review processes can miss unusual interactions that trigger failures. Outages carry real cost: enterprise SLAs can require significant credits when uptime targets are missed, so providers race to remediate and limit impact.
Cloudflare’s transparency and learning
Saumya notes Cloudflare’s commitment to transparency. When incidents occur, Cloudflare publishes detailed postmortems describing root causes and fixes. The company also works to remove brittle dependencies so previous failure modes are less likely to reappear. That said, eliminating all failures at large scale is unrealistic.
How BigScoots mitigated the outage
BigScoots had an operational advantage: while some Cloudflare features were impacted, Cloudflare’s API remained usable. BigScoots automated failovers that toggled Cloudflare proxying off for affected domains, routing traffic directly to BigScoots origin servers until Cloudflare stabilized. That approach reduced downtime for sites hosted on BigScoots but proxied through Cloudflare. Saumya points out that sites relying entirely on Cloudflare Workers or Pages would have been more disrupted because those services and their control planes were affected in the incident.
Why CDN-level HTML page caching matters
Saumya and colleagues pioneered CDN-level HTML page caching for WordPress before it became widespread. Traditional server-side caching stores rendered HTML on the origin; static assets might be served from a CDN, but HTML still required origin involvement. CDN-level page caching places fully rendered HTML at the CDN edge, letting users fetch complete pages from a nearby PoP. That reduces latency for global visitors and lowers origin load dramatically.
Cloudflare Enterprise and tiered caching
Cloudflare Enterprise improves cache hit ratios through advanced tiered caching. In a tiered model, a local PoP checks its cache, then queries an upper tier over Cloudflare’s private backbone before falling back to the origin. This intranet-style fetch is faster and avoids public internet congestion. Higher hit rates mean fewer origin requests, more consistent low latency, and better Core Web Vitals for users worldwide.
BigScoots Cache plugin and developer features
To take full advantage of edge caching, BigScoots developed the BigScoots Cache plugin that tightly integrates WordPress with Cloudflare page caching. Key capabilities include:
– Use of Cloudflare Enterprise caching and tiering to boost hit rates.
– Fine-grained cache controls and TTL tuning per page or content type.
– Intelligent purge logic that clears related pages automatically when content changes (for example, taxonomy and archive pages).
– Hooks and documentation for advanced customization and external integrations.
– A REST API for programmatic cache clearing, enabling backend systems and e-commerce flows to purge caches on content updates.
Direct Cloudflare peering and CNI
BigScoots runs its own data centers and maintains a private connection to Cloudflare via CNI. Instead of relying solely on the public internet for origin fetches, Cloudflare can pull content over a private, high-bandwidth link to BigScoots. That reduces latency and improves reliability for origin pulls. Direct peering requires control of physical data center infrastructure and isn’t available to all hosts, particularly those who only lease resources on big public cloud platforms.
Customer controls and managed services
BigScoots exposes many Enterprise-level Cloudflare controls in its portal with easy toggles for performance, security, and access management. Options include:
– Blocking or challenging traffic by country or continent.
– Bot management and hardening features.
– Image optimization and other speed-related toggles.
– Login protection and WAF settings.
These controls are designed for non-technical users while still offering APIs and hooks for agencies and advanced customers. BigScoots also provides managed onboarding, zero-downtime migrations, performance tuning, and bespoke engineering support for enterprise clients.
Audience and use cases
While BigScoots serves small sites and “mom-and-pop” customers, the Enterprise features and BigScoots Cache plugin are especially valuable for agencies and organizations with many sites, high traffic, or strict uptime and performance needs. Even smaller customers benefit from simple toggles like country blocks or one-click optimizations without requiring deep technical expertise.
Final thoughts
Saumya emphasizes that complexity is inherent in large internet systems and that outages, while serious, are part of operating at scale. Cloudflare’s transparent incident handling and iterative improvements are positive signs. BigScoots focuses on combining deep Cloudflare integration, private peering, intelligent caching, and managed services to reduce downtime, improve speed, and give customers more control.
For more details and links from the episode, visit wptavern.com/podcast and search for the episode featuring Saumya Majumder.
