【Internet】Once Again, Bloat and Centralization Are Destroying Technology

I had promised I wouldn't write a blog post for a few months, but an event happened that forced me to interrupt my vacation during my vacation.
So, what happened?
Cloudflare went down — and took half the internet with it.
That's why I'm here to tell everyone: "Once again, I was right all along".

Ironically, this incident occurred while I was drafting an article I planned to post next year titled "How Bloat and Centralization Are Damaging the Very Technologies Humanity Relies on in Daily Life".
It's as if the universe decided to gift me yet another perfect real-world example to add to the ones I'd already collected.

The Cause

Adding to the string of coincidences, the root cause of this outage was in code written in the programming language Rust — a language whose community I've been criticizing for years.
Not the language itself, but its fanatical zealots.
The Rust evangelists always tell me things like: "Rust is a holy language with zero bugs; nothing bad can ever happen", or other such fairy tales.
Yes, it's true that the compiler catches memory-safety issues and refuses to compile unsafe code.
But that does not mean the resulting program is guaranteed to never crash at runtime.
In fact, according to Cloudflare's own staff, this incident was a memory-related issue that occurred at runtime, and the code was written in Rust.
This happened exactly 53 days after Cloudflare announced they had migrated part of their infrastructure to Rust (available only in English, Chinese, and German).

The number "53" almost feels like a subtle jab at AWS, but I honestly think that's pure coincidence.
…Though when you remember that AWS itself was down for 16 hours just one month ago…
Meanwhile, we at 076 Studio run our own infrastructure, so we were completely unaffected by either outage.
When AWS went down, our services stayed up.
When Cloudflare went down, everything worked as usual.

Rust's Arrogance vs. C's Self-Awareness

Everyone knows the big marketed difference between C and Rust:
"C is not memory-safe, Rust is memory-safe".
But that marketing has bred arrogance in the Rust community.
You constantly see statements like "It's written in Rust, so it can never crash".

We C programmers — and those of us who also write C++ or assembly (I do all of the above) — know perfectly well that the languages we use do not come with a guarantee of memory safety.
That's precisely why we stay constantly vigilant about memory leaks, why we catch every possible error condition, and why we're trained to fail gracefully or recover at runtime when something goes wrong.
These are skills ingrained in us over decades of writing code and shipping products.
If the Rust community had a more realistic attitude toward their chosen language — if they acknowledged that it's not actually a magical unicorn that "can never break" — I'm convinced this incident could have been significantly mitigated, or even prevented.

That's all