React Hook Causes Downtime at Cloudflare, Which Just Stopped the Biggest Ddos
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
blog.cloudflare.comTechstory
calmmixed
Debate
40/100
ReactCloudflareDdosJavascript
Key topics
React
Cloudflare
Ddos
Javascript
A React hook caused downtime at Cloudflare, which had just mitigated a massive DDoS attack, sparking a discussion about the pitfalls of using React and JavaScript.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Light discussionFirst comment
22m
Peak period
4
0-1h
Avg / period
2
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 18, 2025 at 10:02 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 18, 2025 at 10:24 AM EDT
22m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
4 comments in 0-1h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 18, 2025 at 2:22 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45289848Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 6:30:43 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
It gets even worse when you start to pass values down several layers of components when the average advice on the web is "don't overuse useMemo". For those unfamiliar it is a way to memoize a value so you get a stable reference that is only mutated if the underlying data mutates, it basically avoids this specific issue.
React wants you to code in functional immutable style, but the language doesn't provide proper immutable data structures.