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Cloudflare outage affects thousands of services and web pages in many countries

the CDN cloudflare has experienced a widespread failure that has made thousands of pages and online services that use their services have been inaccessible in many countries for more than half an hour. Among the affected services are AWS, Discord, Shopify, Feedly, Canva, NordVPN, Buffer, Medium or Social Blade. Many of the most popular online games, such as LOL or Valorant, have also been affected. The company also provides DNS service, so internet users using Cloudflare’s DNS with their connection will have experienced even more connection issues.

The company has acknowledged on the page where it reports the status of the service that they have a serious operating problem, which has affected many countries. In addition, it points out that “users may have errors or receive messages that they have exceeded the maximum time to connect when they try to access an affected service or website. As he has detailed John Graham Cunning, CTO of Cloudflare, in a thread on Hacker News, it’s not about a complete global service outage. However, he has recognized that it has affected many parts of the planet.

The company has posted on its status information page acknowledging that they had a problem, and a few minutes later they indicated that they had managed to identify it and that they were working to restore service as soon as possible. Several minutes later, another message has appeared, in which they assure that they have already implemented a solution, and that they were controlling the results. They have also reported the progress of the situation through their Twitter account. Meanwhile, the affected websites and services seem to be gradually returning to normal, although you will have to have a little patience until everything works normally again.

This is the second failure suffered by Cloudflare in a week, since last Wednesday it experienced several alterations in its service that affected several services in India. This problem seems to have been more serious, with multiple countries and services affected, and highlights the problem of depending on a service like this, which is responsible for accelerating the loading time and operation of hundreds of thousands of websites and services in all the world. If any problem affects a CDN service, all the services and pages that depend on it, as we have seen, stop working until it is solved. The problem may be resolved in a few minutes, but it may well last for several hours or even days.

A year ago, another CDN, quickly, suffered a problem that left him out of action for just over half an hour. And despite having a much smaller market share than CloudFlare (Fastly is around 5% of the total, compared to nearly 40% for CloudFlare), numerous services were affected, given that Fastly serves some 100,000 Business. Among them eBay, Reddit, Amazon or the New York Times. On that occasion the problem was due to a failure in a software deployment, coupled with a combination of circumstances. They are generally very stable services. But like everything, they can fail, and then cause chaos in the middle of the Internet.

Akamai, another company that includes the provision of CDN services among its product portfolio, also suffered two major outages last year: on June 16 and July 22. Its market share is also similar to that of Fastly. During the first failure, its DDoS attack mitigation service was interrupted due to a routing problem.

The second bug was more serious, as it affected Akamai Edge DNS and caused the DNS that redirects the company’s customers to its CDN to stop working for over an hour. So, services like American Airlines or Steam were no longer accessible for the duration of the problem. These three falls are among the most important of 2021.

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