Millions of users were hit by the recent Cloudflare outage, resulting in massive blackouts for countless businesses. Yet, all PII Tools users remained untouched. This is how “going self-hosted” keeps you in the game.
Cloudflare Outage
On November 18, 2025, the global online world was suddenly struck with widespread disconnections. Thousands of popular websites were rendered useless, including everything from Canva and X to Snapchat and even ChatGPT.
Source: Cloudflare Outage Report
Cloudflare is a critical software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that uses “cloud connectivity” to try and help businesses run better. That is, until it crashes, taking every connected website along with it.
But this is the inherent risk of using some SaaS rather than opting for the more secure and reliable “self-hosted” option.
Self-Hosted Software
While always-connected solutions like Cloudflare may seem convenient at first, they can simply never be as dependable and protected as their self-hosted counterparts.
That means that any businesses and website managers who opted to use a self-hosted option were completely unaffected by the Cloudflare outage. So, while their competitors were trying to get their e-shops back online, self-hosted users just sat back and watched the traffic flow to their own sites.
What makes self-hosted software different:
- You download the software (open-source or licensed).
- You install it on your own hardware:
- your server, a local computer, a VPS, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, etc.
- You’re responsible for keeping it running, secure, and updated.
In other words, you host it, you control it.
PII Tools Remained Fully Operational
PII Tools is a sensitive data discovery software that allows users to discover, analyze, and remediate at-risk data anywhere within their environment. A pretty critical system for all users… the type of system that could cause major cybersecurity risks and regulatory compliance issues had it crashed alongside Cloudflare.
Luckily, PII Tools kept running, completely unaffected by the recent Cloudflare outage. Fully operational, zero interruptions, and for all users worldwide. But how is this possible?
Because PII Tools is built to be self-hosted, fully autonomous, and completely independent of third-party infrastructure. Also, because at PII Tools, we believe your most sensitive, business-critical processes should never hinge on someone else’s uptime.
3 TOP Reasons Self-Hosted Software is Better
- Security Autonomy
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- No dependency on external infrastructure (like Cloudflare).
- You exercise full control of your uptime, access, network, logs, data, and more.
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- Zero Trust by Design
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- Your data lives 100% within your own system, making it literally impossible for the provider (e.g., PII Tools) to see your PII. Ever.
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- Regulatory Compliance Advantages
Your Data, Your Servers, Your Rules
There are additional advantages to opting for a self-hosted system, beyond just protecting your company from Cloudflare outages. And PII Tools ensures its users have access to all of them.
Air-gapped scanning, zero vendor lock-in, enterprise IT alignment, AI Data Protector, Person Cards®, and much more. Just because you use external software to improve your business, doesn’t mean you have to surrender your data to them or watch your website crash when they do.
CTV: Experience Absolute Control Over Your Sensitive Data, and Locate it Better with PII Tools!
