Achieving Cloudflare Outage Resilience using AppiCryptWeb

When the November 18, 2025, Cloudflare outage took down parts of the internet, many teams realized that a single vendor controlled both their content delivery and critical API security. If you are looking for a Cloudflare alternative or a way to harden your stack after “Cloudflare down” incident, the strategic move is to decouple your CDN from API and bot protection, rather than simply swapping one edge provider for another.

The Problem: Cloudflare Single Point of Failure

Cloudflare’s post-mortem shows the outage was triggered by a bot-management configuration file that suddenly doubled in size, exceeded limits, and caused core proxy software to fail for traffic that depended on that module. Because this bot-management logic is embedded in the same global proxy that delivers websites and APIs, a single latent bug propagated to edge servers worldwide and resulted in HTTP 5xx errors for many customers at once.

Many sites were unreachable even though the origin servers were up and running.

High-profile services like X, ChatGPT, Shopify, and several transit and financial platforms were reported as partially or fully unavailable during the incident, even though many of their origin servers were fine. For anyone running revenue-critical APIs, this is a painful reminder that Cloudflare WAF and bot protection being tightly coupled with Cloudflare CDN effectively turns one vendor into a systemic single point of failure.

The Strategy: Decoupling API Security

Instead of asking only “What is the best Cloudflare alternative?”, a better question after this outage is “How do we make API security and bot mitigation portable across CDNs and gateways?” The idea is to treat the CDN purely as a transport and caching layer, while API security and fraud prevention are enforced by your own logic and keys, which you can run on any edge platform.

This is where AppiCryptWeb comes in.

The Solution: AppiCryptWeb

AppiCryptWeb provides a cryptographic, request-level trust signal that is independent of any particular CDN’s internal bot rules, and can be evaluated the same way on NGINX, Cloudflare Workers, AWS API Gateway, or other gateways. That means you can build a multi-CDN or multi-WAF architecture without losing a consistent security posture when traffic fails over away from Cloudflare during an outage.

What AppiCryptWeb Actually Does

AppiCryptWeb is a WebAssembly-based, in-browser security agent that attaches a signed, encrypted cryptogram to every protected API request. Each cryptogram encodes:

• The integrity of the browser runtime

• A privacy-preserving device identity

• A caller-provided nonce

• A timestamp

• Threat flags like tampering, bot automation, or suspicious execution state.

Architectural Overview of AppiCryptWeb

On the backend or at the edge, a lightweight validator decrypts the cryptogram using your keys, checks signatures and freshness, verifies the nonce binding, and returns a detailed risk assessment that your gateway or application can use to allow, challenge, or block the request. Because this verification logic lives in your infrastructure and uses your cryptographic material, it is not subject to Cloudflare’s internal bot-management pipelines or configuration rollouts

Try a live demo to see cryptograms in action.

Why this is a Cloudflare alternative at the API layer

AppiCryptWeb does not try to replace Cloudflare’s global network or DDoS layer, but it does act as a strong Cloudflare alternative for API and bot protection by changing where trust decisions are made. Several aspects are particularly relevant:

Per-request cryptographic proof

Every API call carries its own cryptogram, providing request-level assurance about runtime integrity, device identity, and threat state, rather than relying only on IP reputation or heuristic scoring at the edge.

Replay resistance via nonce binding

Each cryptogram is tied to a unique nonce and timestamp, providing API-level protection against replay and cross-request forgery attacks.

Privacy-preserving browser identity

AppiCryptWeb provides a stable browser fingerprint that does not rely on cookies or invasive tracking, helping distinguish genuine users from scripted bots in a privacy-respecting way.

Fraud-focused signals instead of generic heuristics

The cryptogram explicitly encodes signals relevant to fraud prevention and business logic abuse, giving your backend concrete data points to protect high-value flows.

Works across multi-CDN and multi-WAF setups

Because the validation step is portable, you can run the same enforcement logic on Cloudflare Workers, NGINX, AWS API Gateway, or other providers without changing how cryptograms are generated.

Customer-owned keys and policy

Signatures are verified on your backend or edge using a key ID (KID) that you control, shifting the blast radius of configuration mistakes away from a global outage.

Example architecture after the outage

If the goal is “Cloudflare outage resilience” plus better API security, a practical pattern looks like this:

1

Users hit https://app.example.com behind Cloudflare, Akamai, or any other CDN.

2

The app includes the AppiCryptWeb agent and uses it to attach a cryptogram to all sensitive API calls, bound to a nonce derived from the request body.

3

The first edge hop (NGINX, API Gateway, or Cloudflare Worker) acts purely as an AppiCrypt authorizer: decrypt cryptogram, check policy, compare nonce, and if overallAssessment is OK, forward to the upstream, otherwise reply with 401/403.

4

Because the authorizer is your code and uses your keys, you can run the same logic in another region, another CDN, or even directly on a dedicated WAF if the current edge provider is having a bad day.

You can test this multi-CDN setup in our demo.

This decouples “who gives us packets” (CDN) from “who decides whether the browser is genuine and allowed to touch this API” (your cryptographic runtime-attestation layer).

AppiCrypt Checks Overview in our demo.

How you would integrate AppiCryptWeb

Integration is intentionally minimal:

• Frontend Load a small file, initialize the agent once per app load, and call a function to fetch a cryptogram before sending sensitive API requests.

• Backend/Edge Add a single validation step that decrypts the cryptogram, checks nonce and timestamps, interprets threat flags, and then either forwards the request or responds with 401/403.

This pattern maps cleanly onto familiar infrastructure like NGINX with an auth sub-request, a Cloudflare Worker, or an AWS Lambda authorizer for API Gateway.When this makes sense after the outage

Key Takeaway

AppiCryptWeb is designed for organizations that run high-value web APIs and care about protection against bots, scraping, fraud, and business-logic abuse, while also wanting to reduce concentration risk around a single edge vendor.

The key conceptual shift is to:

• Keep using Cloudflare (or another CDN) for global anycast, caching, TLS termination, and network-layer DDoS.

• Move API trust and authorization into a cryptographic runtime-attestation layer that you own and can run anywhere.

The AppiCryptWeb product page from Talsec product page from Talsec goes deeper into the security model, deployment options, and comparison with API keys and CAPTCHAs

Written by Efim Goncharuk — Talsec AppiCryptWeb Architect