Cloudflare ran into issues this morning, widely disrupting online services and platforms.
But given the reach and scale of Cloudflare, when the company’s network goes down, the entire internet suffers the consequences.
Many sites affected by the outage
Cloudflare is currently one of the leading Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).
The American company also provides Distributed Denial of Service (DoS) protection to online domains, speed optimization, and various cybersecurity services. The company has millions of customers worldwide, including large corporations.
On Tuesday morning, a number of websites and online services suddenly went down. This is particularly the case with Feedly, Cloudflare itself, blogs, cryptocurrency services, etc. Ironically, outage monitors – websites used to check the status of a domain you’re having trouble connecting to – were also affected by the outage.
Problem solved in less than two hours
At 8:43 a.m., the company indicates that it is investigating “generalized problems with its services and/or its network”. Adding that “users may experience errors or extended wait times to reach Cloudflare’s network and services”.
Almost 30 minutes later, Cloudflare is already reacting: “The problem has been identified and a fix is being implemented. »
At 9:20 a.m., a first patch is deployed. The service is then restored on certain websites and platforms previously disconnected by the incident.
As of 10:06 a.m., Cloudflare’s support page indicates that all services are now up and running again.
A “critical” incident
For Cloudflare, this was a “critical P0” incident – meaning an urgent, first priority issue. The company says the incident impacted Cloudflare’s network connectivity in “many regions,” sometimes resulting in 500 errors.
“Earlier today, Cloudflare noticed an outage in some parts of our network. It was not the result of an attack. A network configuration change in some of our data centers has caused part of our network to become unavailable,” Cloudflare told ZDNet.
“Due to the nature of the incident, some customers may have had difficulty accessing websites and services that rely on Cloudflare between approximately 6:28 a.m. and 7:20 a.m. (UTC). Cloudflare worked on a fix within minutes, and the network is now working normally. »
Cascading failures
It’s not exactly a first. In 2019, Cloudflare had already encountered an outage that affected numerous customer services for the American company’s solutions.
In the same vein, the outage that affected CDN Fastly in 2021 also had repercussions for several online services and websites.
Cloudflare is among the top three companies for CDN services today, alongside Akamai and Amazon Cloudfront.
Source: ZDNet.com