From EVA to Ukrposhta: real losses and lessons for business after the global Cloudflare collapse
18 November 23:31
A number of Ukrainian companies suffered losses due to the global failure of the Cloudflare security platform on November 18. In particular, the problem temporarily disabled the websites of Comfy, Eva, Helsi, Podorozhnyk (pharmacy), Ukrposhta, Meest, Planet Kino, YouControl, Foxtrot, Kasta, and about two dozen other services.
International services, from ChatGPT to social networks and streaming platforms, were also affected. Downdetector, an accessibility monitoring platform, was also unavailable, making it difficult to collect operational data.
[Komersant analyzed who was affected and what steps a number of companies need to take today.
Cloudflare outage on November 18: how it all started
The first complaints started coming in at around 13:00-13:30. Cloudflare detected abnormal traffic at around 13:20 and officially reported the error at 13:48. The company announced a partial restoration at 14:21, the implementation of the fix at 16:42, and work on fixing the remaining problems lasted for several more hours. For many customers, this meant downtime, loss of orders, disruption of business processes, and chaotic manual switching.
Cloudflare down: economic consequences for business
As Forbes Ukraine writes in its article, estimates of losses vary. For example, EVA.UA, according to Myropolsky’s estimates, lost about 2,000 orders per hour during the downtime; indirect losses and audience churn are difficult to calculate.
Maxim Pukhov, CIO of the Podorozhnyk pharmacy chain, talks about millions in losses: the failure affected not only the website but also the Medical Information System, and the company worked urgently to restore services bypassing Cloudflare.
At Helsi, the outage started around 13:00. The priority for their team was to get the patient application back online, as the medical ecosystem depends on external services, including the state EHR system.
Comfy restored the mobile app at 15:20 and the website at 16:40. The company will calculate the exact amount of losses later.
Kasta stabilized its work around 15:00 after 1.5 hours of outage.
At Meest, the outage affected at least two sites, and the company reported that it partially uses the services of a global platform.
FUIB noted that the website was temporarily affected, but other services did not stop: their infrastructure uses protection mechanisms other than Cloudflare. By 17:00, the bank’s website was restored.
Watch us on YouTube: important topics – without censorship
Repeated failures of global providers as a risk context
It is worth noting that this incident was the second in the last month: on October 20, Ukrainian businesses already suffered from a large-scale failure of another cloud platform, Amazon Web Services. Thus, dependence on several large infrastructure players is becoming a systemic risk for businesses.
Cloudflare is one of the largest players in the CDN and cloud security segment; its share in certain niches is extremely high. This concentration means that a failure at one global provider instantly affects hundreds of customers from different sectors. For the economy, this is a systemic risk: the speed and security provided by large platforms are combined with vulnerability to a single point of failure.
What businesses should do after a massive CDN and cloud security downtime: an action plan from experts
Already, many Ukrainian market players have responded promptly to the emergency and found at least partial solutions to the problem. In particular, companies have applied
- emergency switching to backup routes and temporary service bypasses;
- local rollback of configurations, disabling reverse proxying on the client side;
- transfer of critical functions to offline modes or alternative channels (call centers, messengers, mobile applications);
- monitoring and post-incident audit – counting missed orders and assessing reputational losses.
For the future, analysts in the field of security network technologies advise companies to do the following:
- Have the ability to quickly disable an external Reverse Proxy and return traffic directly to their servers or through an alternative provider.
- Set up redundant CDNs/Proxies/Firewalls and manual or automatic switching mechanisms.
- Separate critical services (payments, medical records, tracking) so that they do not depend on a single layer of infrastructure.
- Regularly practice external provider failure scenarios.
- Have pre-prepared notification templates and alternative sales and support channels (SMS, push, telephony).
- Revise contracts with suppliers to include compensation and procedures for dealing with large-scale downtime.
The damage and chaos caused by the November 18 incident underscore the vulnerability of businesses to failures of key global infrastructure providers. Large-scale providers provide speed and protection, but their failures instantly affect hundreds of companies simultaneously, from retail to healthcare to public services. The question is whether to look for alternatives and backup scenarios or accept concentration, which brings both benefits and systemic risks.
What you need to know about the global Cloudflare platform
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American technology company founded in 2009 that specializes in ensuring the security, performance, and reliability of web resources. Thanks to its global infrastructure, Cloudflare is one of the world’s leading providers of network solutions for websites, applications, and enterprise systems.
The company provides comprehensive website security tools, including automatic protection against DDoS attacks, a web firewall (WAF) to filter dangerous requests, and a Bot Management system to detect and block malicious bot traffic. In addition to security, Cloudflare focuses on accelerating the performance of Internet resources through an extensive CDN network that caches content in hundreds of data centers around the world. Additional technologies, such as traffic optimization, data compression, image processing, and Argo Smart Routing, help to significantly reduce latency and improve performance.
In the area of cloud infrastructure, Cloudflare offers one of the fastest DNS resolvers – 1.1.1.1, as well as a full-fledged Zero Trust platform for secure access to corporate resources without traditional VPNs. For developers, the company has created the Cloudflare Workers environment, which allows you to run serverless functions directly on the network edge, providing low latency and high scalability.
Read us on Telegram: important topics – without censorship
