The company acknowledged problems at 1148 UTC on November 18, stating: “Some services may be intermittently impacted.” After a long half-hour, it reckoned systems were returning to normal, but “customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates” as engineers continue to investigate and fix the underlying issue.
Cloudflare provides security and infrastructure for a substantial chunk of websites. As such, X (formerly Twitter) and even El Reg were either knocked offline or malfunctioned as the outage continued. Even that stalwart of system uptime, Downdetector, reported “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” at one point.
Cloudflare has yet to confirm the cause of the outage – we will issue an update when it does – but it follows hot on the heels of problems at AWS and Azure, and is a reminder for enterprises that a service is only as good as the weakest link in the chain… and that weakest link might not reveal itself until it breaks.
The problem appears to be global, and the company was forced to do the equivalent of turning off and on its WARP access in London as engineers worked to deal with the glitch. WARP is similar to a VPN, except it routes traffic through Cloudflare’s network. If the network is having a bad day, turning off WARP seems a sensible option.
[…]
Source: Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold • The Register
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft