I've worked at one of the top fintech firms, whenever we do a config change or deployment, we are supposed to have rollback plan ready and monitor key dashboards for 15-30 minutes.
The dashboards need to be prepared beforehand on systems and key business metrics that would be affected by the deployment and reviewed by teammates.
I've never seen a downtime longer than 1 minute while I was there, because you get a spike on the dashboard immediately when something goes wrong.
For the entire system to be down for 10+ minutes due to a bad config change or deployment is just beyond me.
Comparing the difficulty of running the world’s internet traffic with hundreds of customer products with your fintech experience is like saying “I can lift 10 pounds. I don’t know why these guys are struggling to lift 500 pounds”.
This kind of thing would be more understandable for a company without hundreds of billions of dollars, and for one that hasn't centralized so much of the internet. If a company has grown too large and complex to be well managed and effective and it's starting to look like a liability for large numbers of people there are obvious solutions for that.
If this were purely a money problem it would have been solved ages ago. It’s a difficult problem to solve. Also, they’re the youngest of the major cloud providers and have a fraction of the resources that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have.
That fact that no major cloud provider is actually good is not an argument that cloudflare isn't bad, or even that they couldn't/shouldn't do better than they are. They have fewer resources than Google or Microsoft but they're also in a unique position that makes us differently vulnerable when they fuck up. It's not all their fault, since it was a mistake to centralize the internet to the extent that we have in the first place, but now that they are responsible for so much they have to expect that people will be upset when they fail.