It was quite obvious indeed, as they also defaced the website. I switched to Linux Mint XFCE edition because of it :)

Is there some way to self host what cloudflare does?

Your domain will always have to be rented through a 3rd party. Cloudflare is (or was?) one of the better choices for that.

Cloudflare does other things as well, most notably it can acts as a proxy: an inbetween between your server and the users. This inbetween can be useful against DOS attacks, blocking of bots, etc. But for most self hosters that part is not necessary. It’s a toggle in cloudflare’s DNS dashboard: I think you’d want it to say DNS only.

Another thing cloudflare can do is tunneling. It’s useful for when your server is behind a firewall or NAT or double NAT you can’t or don’t want to configure. You’d probably know if you use this, so I assume you don’t?

Is there any meta analysis on these major outages?

They seem to be occuring more and more regularly.

There’s only 2 proposed problems in the article as far as I can tell. They’re not novel ideas, and the author brings no new evidence:

1. “AI”’s disruption of the labor market.
2. “AI” as magnifier of existing problems: fake news, scamming, military applications, domestic surveillance.

2/10 would not recommend the article