A major outage has reportedly struck Cloudflare, a website-security company that caters to an array of websites, shutting down a large chunk of the Internet, including the popular chat service Discord.
Users of Discord, Riot Games, Patreon, Gitlab and various others websites have reported problems with accessing the platforms after Cloudflare, the US-based company that offers DDoS protection to its customers, reportedly came under a distributed denial of service cyber attack itself.
In a statement released shortly after disgruntled users started flocking to Twitter, which itself is still reeling from a major security breach, Cloudflare has confirmed that it had been having an “issue.”
“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
Cloudflare is down right now! This is causing an outage on several websites including- Discord- Downdetector- Riot- Gitlab- Patreon- Authy- Medium- Digital Oceanand many others!
It’s unclear what caused Cloudflare to malfunction. However, the incident has immediately triggered speculations of a possible cyber attack or a major internal failure.
Already excited for the write-up from @Cloudflare. Looks like this was a big thing, and hopefully not a cyber attack. Finding a fix this quickly is an extraordinary feat of software engineering. pic.twitter.com/btpIZS6OBD
Yo guys you can relax, this is just Cloudflare being down, other services just use them. Almost definitely not a cyber attack, probably human error. No need to panic lol
About an hour after the first reports about the sweeping outage came about, Discord reported that it was getting back online.
“Users are beginning to be able to connect, and the upstream internet issues appear to be recovering.”
Downdector, a website that tracks outage of online services and sites, has also been affected by the blackout, leaving concerned netizens that rushed to the site to confirm the reports in the dark.
That moment when even Downdetector is down so you can’t check if a site is down. pic.twitter.com/HAhQ5T8RE5
The reported glitch has apparently blindsided the customers of Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify Inc., many of whom have taken to Twitter to air their grievances.
Shopify has me extremely fucked up. Nigga I’m already losing money not doing shows, now my merch is on hold. Bruh fuck everything ?
?????Cloudflare is down.That means Shopify is down.That means 1,000,000+ Ecommerce stores are down.?????
Some have made no attempt to conceal their frustrations, with Canadian actor and author William Shatner claiming he has been “losing million of dollars every minute in potential sales!”
? @Shopify is down! My store is unreachable! ? I’m losing million of dollars every minute in potential sales! ?
His comment (although, apparently made in jest) has failed to strike a chord with some of the commentators, however.
People are starving globally and you are worried about losing money, Very Sad and unfollowed.
Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare Matthew Prince stated on Twitter that the issue which brought a large portion of the web to a screeching halt appeared to be a router error.
“It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone,” Prince said.
He added that the company had instead rerouted the traffic “across transit provides,” which ultimately led to “some congestion that caused slow performance on some links.”
Cloudflare has already fixed the issue, but is looking “into the root cause” of the problem,” he noted.
We isolated the Atlanta router and shut down our backbone, routing traffic across transit providers instead. There was some congestion that caused slow performance on some links as the logging caught up. Everything is restored now and we’re looking into the root cause. 2/2
The disruption at Cloudflare comes just two days after some 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were breached in a hacking attack that forced them to promote a bitcoin scam. The breach was made possible after hackers got access to an employees’ internal panel.
Twitter has vowed to step up security, locking down thousands of vulnerable accounts, notably those sporting blue verification check-marks, as a precaution.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
