Cloudflare outage disrupts internet, makes websites unreachable

Web-infrastructure giant Cloudflare suffered an outage on Friday, causing a large number of websites to become inaccessible for some time.

The issue continued for nearly 25 minutes before it was finally fixed by the company.

"This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack," the company said in a blog post.

"It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are monitoring systems for stability now."

In another post, Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer John Graham-Cumming revealed that the company was working to address an unrelated issue with a segment of the backbone from Newark to Chicago when, by mistake, it configured all traffic flowing between its data centres to traverse through one location in Atlanta.

The error overwhelmed the Atlanta router and led to issues at other points in the Cloudflare's global network of data centres.

According to Graham-Cumming, because of the architecture of Cloudflare backbone, the issue didn't affect the entire Cloudflare network and was localised only to some geographies, namely, Richmond, Newark, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre.

The incident led to disruption in functioning of several businesses, including digital storefront operator Shopify, as well as Discord, Politico, Deliveroo, GitLab, and Zendesk.

The downdetector.com service, which reports problems with websites across the web, was also affected. The website later showed a surge in issues reported for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform during the outage.

Cloudflare is a leading player in the world of web infrastructure, known for provides various services for the internet to function properly, such as routing of internet traffic, securing websites from cyber attacks, video streaming, domain registration, etc.

This is not the first that Cloudflare has suffered an outage. In July 2019,a major issue across the Cloudflare networkcaused websites around the world to go offline for nearly 30 minutes. The company later revealed that the issue was caused by an injudicious update to its firewall rules. The update caused a CPU spike across the Cloudflare infrastructure, which tied up the company's servers, preventing Cloudflare from connecting internet users to websites.

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