Cloudflare

As I’m sure many of you have noticed we’ve been having connectivity issues since around 12PM today. We have put in place multiple mitigations to try to ensure that you have access to all your bookings.

Now:

We’re running on backup servers. Public booking and admin bookings system should be operating as normal.

What happened:

This issue was not caused by BookingNinja, nor was it in our control. We use a service called Cloudflare, this controls a lot of the systems behind BookingNinja such as the domain, the caching and a lot more. Cloudflare is used by millions of websites including some major ones you know such as Twitter, Sky, all our competitors and more. It’s highly unusual for Cloudflare to go down for long periods of time, so much so that this downtime has made the news on all major UK publications https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/18/cloudflare-outage-causes-error-messages-across-the-internet

What we did about it

Our own internal reporting systems alerted us the instant the systems went down; at this point we have to make a judgement call on how long we expect the downtime to be as due to the nature of the service Cloudflare offers if we move our domain to different servers it then takes time to move it back (and indeed there is a high cost associated with generating new domains, SSL certificates, hosting etc). Cloudflare sometimes blips for a few minutes at max so for the first 10 minutes we assumed that it would recover on it’s own.

Because this issue impacted so many services we then had difficulty letting you know about this issue. Our support platform Gleap was also down, as was our email platform. First things first we set about creating a script that would allow us to email you updates and started to ensure everyone was informed. It’s important to note here a high number of these emails bounced as people have not got up to date email addresses in BookingNinja - please ensure you do so we can communicate with you in cases like this!

When it became clear the issue was much larger we then started the process of creating the backup servers. Our normal backup servers were up and running, however due to the way DNS and domains work; they were not accessible right away. This process involved generating new SSL Certificates, Redeploying all the code, validating the Database connections etc - but this was completed and we sent out the backup site to email.

To be clear:

• BookingNinja was just one of hundreds of thousands of sites impacted.

• We had a backup way of viewing bookings within 1 hour

• We sent out regular communications explaining the issue, and what we’re doing

To be quite honest I’d get frustration here; but equally we moved much faster than the vast majority of businesses impacted. Thank you to everyone who reached out with kind words; it’s always appreciated… you’d be surprised (or maybe not) how stressful dealing with an incident like this can be!

Thank you,
Dan.