Cloudflare downtime and Iconify services

Yesterday Cloudflare experienced a significant outage that affected many services relying on their infrastructure,including Iconify.

This article provides an overview of the incident, its impact on Iconify services, and the steps taken to mitigate the effects.

What was down?

What was down during the Cloudflare outage:

Iconify API, including backup API hosts.
Iconify CDN for scripts.
Iconify websites.

What remained operational:

nothing

Impact on Iconify services

What does that mean for Iconify users?

Users relying on code.iconify.design for load scripts experienced failures in loading Iconify scripts.
Users of Iconify Icon components failed to fetch icon data from the Iconify API.
Iconify plugins for Figma, Penpot and Sketch were down.

Mitigation steps taken

None.

This is the tough reality of relying on third-party services.

Cloudflare is a major provider, and while outages are rare, they can have widespread effects.

If you want to avoid such incidents in the future, consider self-hosting everything:

If you are relying on API, code for API is open source, you can run your own instance.
If you are using Iconify Icon components, consider using alternatives that bundle icons.

Some of alternatives to Iconify icon components, which do not rely on Iconify API:

Why was nothing done?

Building for high availability is costly and complex.

Iconify is an open source project, services are free and money is tight.

Building redundant systems to mitigate third-party outages would require significant resources that are not feasible for open source projects. Cost will be in thousands of dollars per month.

Alternatives to Cloudflare?

There aren’t any.

Reasons:

Most services can only handle static assets, which is not usable for API and websites.
Those few that can handle dynamic assets are too expensive.

Conclusion

Do not rely on third party services.

Host everything yourself.