Protect Your Self Against Cloudflare Disruptions

Written By Ben Rodrigue

Recent Cloudflare outages have made one thing clear: even the most trusted global edge networks are not immune to downtime. When Cloudflare experiences a disruption, businesses that depend on it for DNS, CDN delivery, WAF protection, API routing, or bot management can become unreachable within seconds regardless of how healthy their AWS infrastructure is behind the scenes.

For startups, SaaS, and traditional infrastructure companies, this is more than a technical problem, it’s a direct threat to revenue, customer trust, and operational continuity.

SoftStackers developed the AWS Cloudflare Outage Resiliency Checklist, a strategic framework designed to keep businesses online and functional even when Cloudflare is experiencing global instability.

Our mission is straightforward:

To empower teams to build infrastructure resiliency using AWS-native tools and patterns.

This checklist is more than a collection of best practices it’s a complete blueprint for delivering availability, performance, and security without relying on a single network provider.

“When Cloudflare goes down, your business doesn’t have to. AWS provides all the building blocks for multi-entry routing, DNS redundancy, and high-availability architectures. Our resiliency checklist ensures your systems stay online and responsive during global outages.”

— Ben Rodrigue, CEO, SoftStackers

Why Cloudflare Resilience Matters Now

Organizations often rely heavily on Cloudflare for:

  • DNS resolution

  • CDN edge caching

  • Bot protection

  • WAF filtering

  • SSL termination

  • Global routing

  • API optimization

This makes Cloudflare a central choke point and a single outage can break:

  • Website access

  • Login and authentication flows

  • Checkout pages

  • API gateways

  • Static asset delivery

  • Security pipelines

 SoftStackers’ AWS Resiliency Checklist helps companies build redundancy across DNS, CDN, security, and routing, ensuring continuity when Cloudflare becomes unstable.

Technical Fit: AWS Tools for High Availability, Security & Routing

AWS Route 53 for DNS Redundancy helps eliminate Cloudflare DNS as a single point of failure by offering:

  • DNS failover with health checks

  • Secondary/backup DNS routing

  • Global propagation with low-latency routing

  • Isolation from Cloudflare DNS disruptions

Even if Cloudflare DNS is unreachable, Route 53 can continue resolving your domain.

AWS CloudFront as a Backup (or Parallel) CDN

CloudFront provides an alternate content delivery path during Cloudflare outages: 

  • Duplicate CDN layer

  • Edge caching for static assets

  • Origin failover for backend traffic

  • Integration with S3, ALB, and Lambda@Edge

Organizations can use CloudFront with Cloudflare for instant fallback while ensuring security continuity with AWS WAF and AWS Shield.

If Cloudflare's security layer goes down, AWS provides full-stack protection:

  • Layer 7 filtering with AWS WAF

  • DDoS mitigation via AWS Shield

  • Bot management with built-in rules

  • Native integration with CloudFront and ALB

This ensures traffic remains secure and filtered even when Cloudflare’s firewall isn’t functioning.

Direct Origin Access Through AWS Load Balancers

One major risk: many businesses route all inbound traffic through Cloudflare.

 AWS allows alternative, direct-access paths using:

  • Application Load Balancer (ALB)

  • Network Load Balancer (NLB)

  • API Gateway endpoints

These can be activated automatically when Cloudflare becomes unreachable.

AWS Global Accelerator for Stable, Global Routing 

Global Accelerator provides:

  • Static anycast IPs

  • Intelligent traffic rerouting

  • Faster global performance

  • A completely separate routing path from Cloudflare

This gives you a fully independent way for users to reach your application.

Monitoring & Automation with CloudWatch + EventBridge 

AWS monitoring tools can detect Cloudflare disruptions and take action:

  • CloudWatch: monitors latency, error rates, traffic failures

  • EventBridge: triggers automation (cache warming, DNS switching, alerts)

  • Lambda: executes fallback routing or emergency workflows

Teams can centralize traffic, DNS, and performance metrics in one view.

What Teams Should Do Today

SoftStackers recommends the following steps for Cloudflare outage readiness:

✔ Identify systems fully dependent on Cloudflare
DNS, CDN, WAF, API, redirects, and authentication are the usual points of failure.

✔ Add a backup DNS provider using Route 53
Prevents global outages from taking down your domain.

✔ Enable CloudFront as a parallel CDN

Redundant caching ensures your site and assets remain reachable.

✔ Create a direct-access path into AWS

Expose an ALB/NLB endpoint or API Gateway path for emergency routing.

✔ Deploy AWS WAF + Shield

Separate your security pipeline from Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

✔ Build monitoring and auto-failover workflows

CloudWatch + EventBridge + Lambda provide automated detection and response.

✔ Test real outage scenarios

Validate DNS failover, CDN routing, WAF fallback, and origin paths.

From Preparation to Production Reliability

Organizations that build Cloudflare redundancy with AWS consistently achieve: 

  • Higher reliability

  • Fewer support escalations

  • Better customer trust

  • Improved conversion rates during outages

  • Peace of mind knowing they aren’t dependent on a single global network

Start small. Add redundancy to one system DNS, CDN, or security and expand over time.

Ready to Make Your Stack Cloudflare-Outage-Proof? 

Contact SoftStackers to book a 30-minute Cloudflare Resiliency Prep Session and ensure your AWS-powered systems stay online even when global infrastructure providers go down.

We’ll help you design:

✔ DNS redundancy with Route 53

✔ CloudFront fallback paths

✔ AWS WAF + Shield protection

✔ Full outage and routing continuity 

Stay resilient. Stay online. Stay protected.

Ben Rodrigue https://www.softstackers.com
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