Technology
Cloudflare claims its Sunday morning issues were triggered by the CenturyLink outage.
Cloudflare said that its Sunday morning shutdown involving various websites was due to an IP interruption by the Internet service provider CenturyLink. According to a tweet from CenturyLink, all affected services have been restored to 11:15 AM ET.
Today we have seen a massive online internet outage that has affected several providers, the Cloudflare representative said in an email to The Verge. There was not a particular Cloudflare outage. Level 3 / CenturyLink was blamed for an outage involving many Internet providers, including Cloudflare. The automated systems of Cloudflare recognized the problem and routed around it, but the magnitude of the problem still needed manual intervention.
We are able to confirm that all services impacted by today’s IP outage have been restored. We understand how important these services are to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this outage caused.
— CenturyLink (@CenturyLink) August 30, 2020
The shutdown started early Sunday, and according to Cloudflare's status report, an elevated number of HTTP 5xx class errors, such as 522 & 503, were observed. In a later update, Cloudflare said that it had found a "transit provider problem" as the cause of the issue, and that it was working on a patch. Both data centers that use the transit service were impacted by the outage.
Cloudflare is aware of network related issues caused by a third-party transit provider incident. We are working to mitigate the problem. Please follow the status page here: https://t.co/9DSYq0HIa7
— Cloudflare Help (@CloudflareHelp) August 30, 2020
Cloudflare 's systems are planned to discourage websites from suffering interruptions due to high traffic loads as well as DDoS or spam comments attacks. DownDetector revealed that Sunday's blackout was affecting the US and parts of western Europe, and that sites like Discord, Hulu, Feedly, Xbox Live, and hundreds of others seemed to be affected.
CenturyLink experienced a major disruption in 2018 involving 911 calls, ATM deposits, lottery draws and other facilities.
