Internet down? Several major websites went down massively due to Cloudflare

A list of popular websites was taken down and started showing a “500 internal server error” on Tuesday due to an issue with the content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare. Web services affected included Discord, Canva, and NordVPN, among others. Some people weren’t even able to fathom the scale of the outage on Ookla’s DownDetector, which is supposed to help track internet outages around the world. Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption and implemented the fix shortly after the downtime was reported by some users on social media.

According to the latest update available on the Cloudflare Status website, a “critical P0 incident” was declared at 06:34 UTC (12:04 IST) which disrupted Cloudflare’s network in large areas. The company said the incident impacted all data plan services on its network and resulted in 500 errors across all websites and services using the CDN.

As of 07:20 UTC (12:50 IST), Cloudflare said on its status website that it has implemented a fix and started monitoring the results.

In a statement emailed to Gadgets 360 after the patch was released, Cloudflare clarified that the issue was not the result of an external attack. A network change in some of its data centers rendered part of its network unavailable, the company said.

“Due to the nature of the incident, customers may have had difficulty accessing websites and services that rely on Cloudflare between approximately 06:28 and 07:20 UTC. Cloudflare was working on a fix within minutes and the network works normally now,” Cloudflare said in its statement.

“Given the scale of Cloudflare and the percentage of the internet that depends on our network, when we encounter issues, it’s critical that we are open and transparent about what happened, why it happened. and what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The company also said it would post a post-mortem via its blog later Tuesday.

Several people on social media complained about the outage which was not limited to a handful of websites but impacted services such as Discord, Canva and NordVPN. Game servers including Minecraft and Valorant were also unresponsive due to the issue, according to details available on DownDetector.in.

Some affected users were even unable to access the DownDetector website due to the outage.

Although the affected websites and services are taking some time to return for all users, Discord confirmed on its status website that it began functioning properly globally as of 7:20 a.m. PDT (12:50 p.m. IST).

The Cloudflare CDN powers a large number of websites and services around the world. A report by web technology survey firm W3Techs shows that Cloudflare is the global CDN market leader, overtaking competitors such as Akamai and Amazon CloudFront. The dominance is the reason for the massive shutdown though.

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