Cloudflare outage knocks many major websites offline

21 Jun 2022

Image: © bilalulker/Stock.adobe.com

Cloudflare issued a status update this morning saying a ‘critical’ incident was detected, while users reported issues visiting Shopify, Udemy, Amazon and many other websites.

Dozens of major websites were down and showing error reports this morning (21 June) as a result of “service issues” from Cloudflare.

The company said on its status page at 8am Irish time that the issue behind the outage had been identified and a fix had been implemented. Just after 9am, it confirmed that the incident had been resolved and all systems are operational.

Social media users were reporting issues accessing many of their favourite websites and services including Amazon, Telegram, Twitch, Canva, Shopify Udemy, Coinbase and many others.

There were also reports that DoorDash, Crunchyroll, NordVPN, and Feedly are down as a result of the outage.

Cloudflare, which is the backbone of many of the web’s biggest sites, said this morning that it was investigating “widespread” issues with its network.

The company detailed that a “critical P0” incident was detected at around 7.30am and its network had been disrupted in “broad regions”.

“Eyeballs attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors,” Cloudflare said on its update page this morning. “The incident impacts all data plane services in our network.”

This is not the first time Cloudflare has been hit with such an issue. A major Cloudflare outage in 2019 was due to “a massive spike in CPU that caused primary and secondary systems to fall over”.

The company has not yet revealed what caused this latest outage.

US-based Cloudflare is one of the major content delivery network providers. It also provides distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection to online domains along with other services.

Last week, Cloudflare said it was able to detect and mitigate a record-breaking DDoS attack that generated 26m requests a second.

Updated, 9.25am, 21 June 2022: This article was updated after Cloudflare said the incident was resolved.

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Leigh Mc Gowran is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com