On Tuesday (June 21st), major cloud computing network Cloudflare had an outage, knocking numerous popular websites and services offline for more than an hour. Soon after, Cloudflare apologized for the outage, citing a configuration change made during network upgrades as the cause.
A number of websites and Internet services, including Feedly, Cloudflare, blogs, bitcoin services, and others, fell down unexpectedly on Tuesday morning. Down detectors (websites that verify the status of another domain you’re having difficulties connecting to) also went offline as a result of this.
The outage wreaked havoc on the entire system. Because of the extent and complexity of Cloudflare’s operations, when the company’s network goes down, it affects the whole Internet.
Cloudflare’s support team claimed they were investigating “widespread difficulties with our services and/or network” in a 7.43 AM update. The Cloudflare API has gone unavailable, according to the Cloudflare status website.
Cloudflare, in a statement, had the following to say:
Users may experience errors or timeouts reaching Cloudflare’s network or services. We will update this status page to clarify the scope of impact as we continue the investigation.
Cloudflare sent another update around 30 minutes later and had the following to say:
The issue has been identified, and a fix is being implemented.
Cloudflare has classified the event as a “critical P0” occurrence, which is a broad term for an urgent, first-priority issue. Furthermore, the event disrupted connection in Cloudflare’s network across “wide areas,” resulting in 500 errors, according to the business.
Cloudflare announced at 8.20 AM that they had put out a patch and were “watching the outcomes.” At this moment, service was restored to certain websites that had been taken offline due to the Cloudflare network outage.
Cloudflare’s update page reported that all services were functioning by 9.13 AM.
Today, June 21, 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of our data centers. This was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations. Here’s what happened: https://t.co/Hb7lRJ2ND6
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) June 21, 2022
A Spokesman at Cloudflare had the following to say:
Earlier today, Cloudflare saw an outage across parts of our network. This was not the result of an attack. A network change in some of our data centers caused a portion of our network to be unavailable. Due to the nature of the incident, customers may have had difficulty reaching websites and services that rely on Cloudflare from approximately 6.28 – 7.20 am UTC. Cloudflare was working on a fix within minutes, and the network is running normally now. Given Cloudflare’s scale and the percentage of the Internet that relies on our network, when we have problems, it is vital that we are open and transparent about what happened, why it happened, and what we’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
From roughly 2.28 PM to 3.20 PM Singapore time, users may have experienced trouble accessing websites and services that rely on Cloudflare’s network, according to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare has written a blog post on the outage that includes a post-mortem. The outage reportedly affected 19 data centers that “carry a large amount of our worldwide traffic,” according to the business.
Cloudflare, in a statement, had the following to say:
This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations. We are very sorry for this outage. This was our error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity.
The problem was caused by a network configuration change in prefixes, which meant that numerous IP addresses were no longer reachable.