Cloudflare outage takes down websites globally for over an hour: Report

An outage at Cloudflare, a content delivery network used by many companies, took down multiple websites across the globe on Tuesday. 

The effect was felt by users of some of the key hotspots of internet traffic, such as Twitter, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Discord, Zerodha, Shopify, and Canva, according to Downdetector, an online platform that provides users with real-time overview of issues and outages at various websites and services.

Websites like Udemy, Splunk, Quora, Crunchyroll were also down, along with crypto exchanges such as WazirX, Coinbase, FTX, Bitfinex, and OKX. Most of these websites were later accessible.

Cloudflare said it had suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of its data centres, adding that “unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic”. “Even though these locations are only 4 per cent of our total network, the outage impacted 50 per cent of total requests,” it said in a blogpost.

The outage was caused by a “change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations”.

The outage started at 11.57 am IST. At 12:28 pm IST the first data centre was brought back online and by 1:12 pm IST all data centres were online and working correctly, the company said.

Over the last 18 months, Cloudflare has been working to convert all of its busiest locations to a more flexible and resilient architecture. So far, it has converted 19 of its data centres to the architecture internally called Multi-Colo PoP (MCP). These are: Amsterdam, Netherlands; Atlanta, United States; Ashburn, US; Chicago, US; Frankfurt, Germany; London, United Kingdom; Los Angeles, US; Madrid, Spain; Manchester, UK; Miami, US; Milan , Italy; Mumbai, India; Newark , US; Osaka, Japan; São Paulo, Brazil; San Jose, US; Singapore; Sydney, Australia; and Tokyo, Japan.

A critical part of this new architecture is an added layer of routing that creates a mesh of connections. This mesh allows Cloudflare to easily disable and enable parts of the internal network in a data centre for maintenance or to deal with a problem, the internet infrastructure firm said.

On June 13 this year, Amazon.com’s e-commerce services were down for thousands of users, according to Downdetector.com.

Last year, a major global internet outage took place on June 9, which Fastly, the company behind the issue, said was caused by a bug in its software that was triggered when one of its customers changed their settings. The outage had raised questions about the reliance of the internet on a few infrastructure companies. Fastly’s issue knocked out high-traffic sites, including news providers such as The Guardian and New York Times, British government sites, Reddit and Amazon.com.