No, the forum server did not go down.

[NotATether]

It was Cloudflare's botched routing again. It even took down the Bitcoin Wiki and my website.
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ (still says implementing a fix as of UTC+0 07:14, but it looks like its done now)

Some of you may still encounter those blasted DDoS checks though, occasionally they interfere with my ability to post in the last few minutes.

I can't post at all though Lynx because of those 503 Cloudflare challenges. Might want to look into that admins. Fixed.

[Cookdata]

Not just bitcointalk, it happens that almost all centralized exchanges were down including marketcaps with internal server error.
The affected platforms include Coingecko, Kucoin, Hotbit, Coin marketcap, coinbase,Discord and many more but all good now.

[dkbit98]

It was Cloudflare's botched routing again. It even took down the Bitcoin Wiki and my website.

Hip Hip Hurray! I think I missed all the fun again... maybe that was also causing some issues with images recently
I don't know why I have a feeling we are going to see more of this issues in future, but I think forum should have some alternative option ready in case Cloudflare explodes again.
If anyone knows good usable alternative for Cloudflare in 2022 please post it below.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

So cloudflare goes down or effected by any reason, all website that use cloudflare is going to be effected. This means you are hostage to a centralized service. I don't know how long the site was down but imagine how powerful cloudflare is becoming by collecting all data from their clients.

maybe that was also causing some issues with images recently

The image issue is completely different from my experience.

[Husires]

Weird, I was offline at that time, but I was following the news without logging in and I did not encounter any problems, it seems that the problem did not last long.
It is a good opportunity to get acquainted with all the central services.
Bitcointalk problems became less with cloudflare, despite all the flaws.

[BitMaxz]

I haven't experienced any issue recently even on accessing other websites maybe not all people are affected by this outage and based on the status there are still rerouting servers.

If anyone knows good usable alternative for Cloudflare in 2022 please post it below.

The only two options that I know and experienced before are Aws CloudFront and Sucuri but I mostly use Cloudflare because it's free and there are many guides that you can find on Google.

[Smartvirus]

I was hit by this outage at about 6:50am forum time and somehow, it was normal to me, haven't experienced it before hand. I think the first was a "503 error" but in today's outage, it displayed a "500 internal server error". These are simply codes for some likely disruption in Internet connectivity and a quick search on this code on Google search engine produced results that described it to be a disruption that occurs on HTTP and could be related to new plugins or update on a system.

I might be wrong but, is there updates been carried out on the forum as its rumoured, with we looking towards the new forum software. Could this error account to some integration been done on the forum to ensure its maintenance. Anyway, it didn't take up to 30minutes to come through so there isn't a reason to be alarmed.

[NotATether]

If anyone knows good usable alternative for Cloudflare in 2022 please post it below.

And here lies the problem, most of us don't use Cloudflare for the DDoS protection (indeed, we hardly get DDoS'es) but for the content delivery network.

Without a CDN, it'd take a real long time (a few seconds latency) for some cliet in South America or Oceania to connect to a server somethere in the US or EU.

[Markinzo]

I personally didn't had such issues logging in cause within the short period of effect on cloudflare I was offline. Like other users have earlier recommended I think an alternative should be made for users to follow with in accessing their accounts should such issue resurface or anything close to it.

For old and experienced forum users they may not be alarmed on this as a result of their knowlege about the whole stuff, but the case may not be same for an entirely newbie.

[BitcoinGirl.Club]

It was down again for the last few minutes. I was about to make a post but then noticed the server is down. It stayed few minutes before going back to normal.

Mention: This time it was not cloudflare but it seemed to me the hosting was down for few minutes.

[PrimeNumber7]

So cloudflare goes down or effected by any reason, all website that use cloudflare is going to be effected. This means you are hostage to a centralized service. I don't know how long the site was down but imagine how powerful cloudflare is becoming by collecting all data from their clients.

The forum itself is a centralized service and has a centralized server being hosted somewhere.

In terms of reliability, cloud flare is a net benefit, as it has the ability to stop/mitigate ~all DDOS attacks and is generally reliable.

There are factors unrelated to reliably, such as privacy and the potential for CF to execute a mitm attack that are a negative to using cf

[iroseyike]

It was Cloudflare's botched routing again. It even took down the Bitcoin Wiki and my website.

Hip Hip Hurray! I think I missed all the fun again... maybe that was also causing some issues with images recently
I don't know why I have a feeling we are going to see more of this issues in future, but I think forum should have some alternative option ready in case Cloudflare explodes again.
If anyone knows good usable alternative for Cloudflare in 2022 please post it below.

Cloudflare Alternatives are listed below;
Akamai
Sucuri
Amazon CloudFront
Stackpath
Fastly
Google Cloud CDN