Sandy, Meet CloudFlare

On October 28, 2012, a large hurricane named Sandy was approaching the Eastern United States, with landfall expected around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two of CloudFlare's data centers, Ashburn, VA and Newark, NJ, were likely to be impacted by high winds and rain from the hurricane. To ensure service continuity, vendors running these buildings had taken several precautions such as testing backup generators, securing fuel supplies, arranging staff availability, and preparing emergency supplies. CloudFlare's network design also ensured no single points of failure, allowing traffic to fail over automatically to the next closest data center in case of connectivity loss. The company had experience with hurricanes like Irene a year prior and was closely monitoring Sandy's impact on their facilities.