While the Web Waits: Why PixelUnion Remains Online During Today's Cloudflare Outage
If you have been browsing the web today, you have likely encountered more than a few “502 Bad Gateway” errors or endless loading spinners. As widely reported, the Cloudflare Global Network is currently experiencing a significant outage, impacting millions of websites and services across the globe.
However, if you are reading this, you have already noticed that PixelUnion.eu is fully operational.
This isn’t an accident. It is the result of a strategic infrastructure decision we made to ensure our uptime isn’t tied to a single point of failure that affects half the internet. Our secret? We use bunny.net to serve our static content.
What is a CDN and Why Does It Matter?
To understand why this decision saved us today, it helps to understand what a Content Delivery Network (CDN) actually does.
A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. Instead of everyone in the world trying to download our website’s images, CSS, and JavaScript from a single server in one city, a CDN stores copies of these files in data centers all over the world.
- Reduced Latency: A user in Berlin downloads assets from a server in Frankfurt, not San Francisco.
- High Availability: If one server goes down, another picks up the slack.
Most of the internet relies on US-based giants for this service. When they sneeze, the whole world catches a cold.
How PixelUnion Uses bunny.net
At PixelUnion, we use bunny.net to serve the static content for our main website and our internal support processes. This includes:
- High-resolution imagery
- Stylesheets (CSS) and JavaScript files
- Support documentation assets
A Note on Privacy: It is important to clarify that while we love bunny.net for our public-facing assets, we do not use it for our tenants. For strict privacy and data sovereignty reasons, tenant data is handled through separate, isolated pipelines. We believe in using the right tool for the job, and for customer data, that means keeping it completely segregated from public content networks.
Why We Chose a European Alternative
Choosing bunny.net wasn’t just about avoiding the “big players”; it was a conscious decision to align with our values as a European company.
1. True European Data Sovereignty
Bunny.net is headquartered in Slovenia (EU). Unlike US-based providers which are subject to the US CLOUD Act (allowing US agencies to access data stored abroad), bunny.net offers a infrastructure that is truly aligned with European privacy standards.
- GDPR Compliance: Their data processing and privacy focus are built from the ground up for GDPR, not patched on as an afterthought.
- Routing Control: We can strictly control where our data flows, ensuring it stays within the EU when necessary.
2. Reliability Through Diversity
Today’s outage highlights the danger of the “monoculture” in web infrastructure. By using bunny.net, PixelUnion is running on a completely different backbone than the sites currently failing.
- While Cloudflare struggles with global routing issues today, our assets are being delivered via bunny.net’s Tier 1 global network without a hitch.
- Diversifying our vendors means we aren’t helpless when a single provider has a bad day.
3. Performance and Simplicity
Beyond the geopolitical and reliability advantages, bunny.net is simply fast. In our benchmarks, their latency in Europe is often lower than their US competitors. They offer an incredibly performant localized edge network that ensures our European customers get the snappy experience they expect.
Conclusion
In the world of digital infrastructure, “boring” is good. We want our site to load instantly, every time, without drama.
By choosing bunny.net, we have secured a partner that understands the European market, respects data privacy, and—as proven today—keeps the lights on when others go dark. We hope the rest of the internet comes back online soon, but in the meantime, we’ll be here, serving content faster than ever.