Cloudflare service hit by ‘widespread issues’

Cloudflare is experiencing problems, causing widespread disruption for online services and platforms. 

Cloudflare is one of today’s major content delivery networks (CDNs). The US firm also provides Distributed Denial-of-Service (DoS) protection to online domains, speed optimization, and various cybersecurity services. 

The company accounts for millions of customers worldwide including major enterprise firms. 

On Tuesday morning, a number of websites and online services suddenly went down including Feedly, Cloudflare itself, blogs, cryptocurrency services, and more. Ironically, this also meant that down detectors — websites used to check the status of another domain you are having trouble connecting to — also went offline. 

Considering the scope and scale of Cloudflare, when the firm’s network goes down, the entire internet feels the impact. 

In an update at 7.43 am, Cloudflare’s service team said they were investigating “widespread issues with our services and/or network.” According to the Cloudflare status page, the Cloudflare API is currently offline.

The company said:

“Users may experience errors or timeouts reaching Cloudflare’s network or services. We will update this status page to clarify the scope of impact as we continue the investigation.”

In a further update roughly 30 minutes later, Cloudflare said, “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

Cloudflare has described the situation as a “critical P0” incident — a situation loosely described as an urgent, first-priority problem. Furthermore, the company said the incident impacted connectivity in Cloudflare’s network in “broad regions,” leading to 500 errors. 

“The incident impacts all data plane services in our network,” the company added. 

By 8.20 am, Cloudflare said a fix has been rolled out and “we are monitoring the results.” It appears that service has been restored to some websites and online platforms taken offline by the problem in Cloudflare’s network. 

ZDNet will update this article as the situation develops. 

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