Cloudflare posts detailed blog about outage that hit multiple websites

Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare has issued a detailed blog post on its outage that briefly impacted several websites around Tuesday noon and was fixed in about an hour. Many websites were down briefly around Tuesday noon after Cloudflare suffered an outage.

However, the issue was resolved and services were restored in about an hour. Zerodha, Urban Company, Discord, DoorDash were among those that were affected.

Users attempting to access certain websites got ‘500 Internal Server Error’ message and many took to social media to report the disruption. The services were restored after the brief disruption.

“Today … Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of our data centres. Unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic. This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations,” Cloudflare said in a blog post later.

“Depending on your location in the world, you may have been unable to access websites and services that rely on Cloudflare,” it added.

Cloudflare apologised to users and clarified that “This was our error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity.”

The blog explained the incident, timelines and impact, technical description of the error and how it happened along with remediation and follow-up steps.

Earlier in the day, Urban Company, in a tweet at about 12.33 PM said “… our DNS partner, Cloudflare is currently experiencing issues in India due to which Urban Company app and website are temporarily inaccessible”. It followed up with another tweet after about an hour to say that the issue has been resolved and Urban Company app and website are back on.

Zerodha in a tweet past noon advised those unable to use its websites or apps to try switching to a different ISP, saying a different route may work.

“Cloudflare (network transit, proxy, security provider) used by most of the internet businesses around the world, is having a global outage,” Zerodha said at 12.20 PM.

Zerodha put out a tweet after a while saying “Cloudflare network is back to normal and all sites are functional now.”