Saumya Majumder, lead software engineer at BigScoots, joined the Jukebox Podcast to walk through a major Cloudflare outage, explain how platform failures ripple across the web, and describe the WordPress performance tooling his team builds—often tightly integrated with Cloudflare Enterprise.
Background
Saumya focuses on high-performance WordPress and Cloudflare-first architectures. Early in his career he worked on caching problems and co-created the Super Page Cache for Cloudflare plugin. Since then he’s built custom caching engines, migration tools, worker automations, edge computing solutions, and internal and enterprise WordPress tooling at BigScoots.
What happened in the Cloudflare outage and why it mattered
Saumya stresses that modern CDN and edge providers do much more than serve static files. They are large, interdependent stacks where a small unexpected change can cascade. In the episode he described how a configuration file unexpectedly ballooning in size can create behaviors that resemble a DDoS, prompting automated mitigations and investigations that may be misdirected at first and prolong the incident. Even after the root cause is fixed, global propagation across many points of presence (PoPs) and sudden traffic spikes slow recovery.
He emphasizes that outages are inevitable—even at well-engineered providers like Cloudflare, Google, or AWS. What matters is how incidents are handled. Saumya praised Cloudflare for publishing detailed postmortems and iterating to reduce recurrence, and noted that large providers treat these events seriously because of SLAs and customer impact.
How BigScoots mitigated customer impact
Impact varied depending on which Cloudflare features a site relied on. For BigScoots-hosted sites proxied through Cloudflare, the team used Cloudflare’s API to quickly disable proxying, sending traffic directly to BigScoots origins and keeping many sites online while Cloudflare recovered. That approach helps when the origin is separate from Cloudflare; it doesn’t help customers whose sites run entirely on Cloudflare-managed hosting like Workers or Pages, where the outage affects the hosting layer itself.
The evolution from origin caches to CDN-level page caching
Saumya described the progression from origin-side HTML caches (advanced-cache.php style) to serving full HTML from the CDN. Origin caches reduce PHP and database load, but latency can remain for geographically distant visitors. Serving cached HTML from a nearby PoP removes that latency and dramatically improves response times. BigScoots and others pioneered delivering full HTML from the CDN so users fetch pre-rendered pages from an edge location instead of the origin.
Cloudflare Enterprise and tiered caching
On Cloudflare Enterprise, high-assurance global page caching and better cache-hit ratios are possible. Saumya explained Cloudflare’s tiered-cache model: a lower-tier PoP first checks nearby or regional cache tiers inside Cloudflare’s private network. If content isn’t found there, the request moves up through tiers before going to origin. This intra-Cloudflare tiering reduces origin fetches and raises the likelihood a request is served from cache, improving speed worldwide.
Private connectivity and data center strategy
BigScoots operates its own data centers and maintains direct physical connections to Cloudflare (carrier network interconnects). Instead of Cloudflare fetching origin content over the public internet, these private links let Cloudflare pull directly from BigScoots’ origin network with lower latency and more reliable performance. Most hosts lease infrastructure from cloud providers and can’t set up such physical interconnects; BigScoots’ approach of owning hardware and building direct links is a differentiator for origin fetch performance.
BigScoots Cache plugin and control features
To manage CDN-level page caching and give site owners fine-grained control, BigScoots developed the BigScoots Cache plugin. Key capabilities include:
– CDN-level page caching integrated with Cloudflare Enterprise for higher cache-hit ratios.
– Intelligent cache purging that clears related pages (taxonomies, archives, author pages) when content changes, not just the single updated page.
– Hooks and a REST API so advanced users or external systems can trigger purges and integrate with custom workflows.
– Admin toggles in the BigScoots portal for login protection, hardening, image optimization, Rocket Loader, and bot management.
– Geo and country controls to block or challenge traffic from specific countries or continents via simple portal settings.
Managed support and enterprise onboarding
BigScoots pairs its tooling with managed services: zero-downtime migrations, enterprise onboarding, performance optimization packages, and bespoke engineering work. For agencies and large customers they do hands-on configuration and implement custom logic for edge cases (for example, theme-specific pseudo-archives). Documentation is available for advanced users, but most customers rely on managed support for setup and tuning.
Takeaways
Incidents like the Cloudflare outage are disruptive but part of operating at scale. Large providers typically respond transparently and use postmortems to improve. BigScoots combines Cloudflare Enterprise integrations, private data center interconnects, and its own caching and operational tooling to maximize WordPress performance, reliability, and control. Their platform offers simple toggles and managed help for novices, while providing hooks, APIs, and fine-grained controls for power users and enterprise customers.