What caused Internet Outage? Cloudfare outage takes down popular websites all over the world

Major Internet Outage today:  An outage at Cloudflare, a content delivery network that is used by many companies, took down multiple websites globally on June 21, 2022. The effect of the internet Cloudflare outage was felt by the users of some of the key hotspots of internet traffic, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Twitter, Zerodha, Shopify, Discord, and Canva, as per the Downdetector, an online platform that provide users with the real-time overview of issues and outages at various websites and services. Reportedly, over the last 18 months, Cloudflare has been working to convert all of its busiest locations to a more flexible and resilient architecture.

Cloudflare (network transit, proxy, security provider) used by most of the internet businesses around the world, is having a global outage. If you are unable to use our websites or apps, please try switching to a different ISP as a different route may work. pic.twitter.com/5NYsDJw6Vv

— Zerodha (@zerodhaonline) June 21, 2022

Internet Cloudflare Outage: When did it happen?

The Internet outage due to Cloudflare system failure started at 11.57 am IST. At 12.28 PM IST, the first data centre was brought online and by 1.12 PM IST all the data centres were online and working correctly, as per Cloudfare.

Internet Cloudflare Outage: What was the effect?

Due to the global internet Cloudflare outage, websites such as Udemy, Splunk, Quora, Crucnhyroll were down along with the crypto exchanges such as WazirX, Coinbase, FTX, Bitfinex, and OKX. However, most of these websites were later accessible.

As per Cloudflare, it suffered an outage that affected the traffic in 19 of its data centres. It further added that unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic. Even though these locations are only 4 percent of Cloudflare’s total network, the outage impacted 50 per cent of the total requests.

Internet Cloudfare Outage: What caused it?

As per Cloudflare, the internet outage affecting major websites all over the world was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase the resilience in Cloudflare's busiest locations.

Over the last 18 months, Cloudfare has been working to convert all of its busiest locations to a more flexible and resilient architecture. So far, the company has converted 19 of its data centres to the architecture internally called Multi-Colo PoP (MCP).

A critical part of this architecture is an added layer of routing that creates a mesh of connections. This mesh allows the Cloudflare to easily disable and enable the parts of the internal network in a data centre for maintenance or to deal with the problem.

Internet Outage in 2021

A major global internet outage took place in June 9, 2021, which Fastly, the company behind the issue, said was caused by a bug in its software that was triggered when one of its customers changes their settings. The Internet Outage had also raised questions about the reliance of the internet on a few infrastructure companies.

What is Cloudflare?

It is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company which was founded in 2010. Cloudflare primarily acts as a reverse proxy between the website’s visitor and the Cloudflare customer’s hosting provider. As of 2020, Cloudflare has been providing DNS Services to over 1,00,000 customers.