Cloudflare says its Sunday morning problems were due to CenturyLink outage
Cloudflare said its Sunday morning outage affecting numerous websites was due to an IP outage by internet service provider CenturyLink. According to a tweet from CenturyLink, all affected services have been restored as of 11:15AM ET.
“Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted many multiple providers,” a Cloudflare representative said in an email to The Verge. “This was not a Cloudflare-specific outage. Level 3/CenturyLink was responsible for an outage that affected many Internet services, including Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”
We are able to confirm that all services impacted by today’s IP outage have been restored. We understand how important these services are to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this outage caused.
— CenturyLink (@CenturyLink) August 30, 2020
The outage began early Sunday, and according to Cloudflare’s status page, it was seeing “an increased level of HTTP 5xx class errors,” such as 522 and 503. In a later update Cloudflare said it had “identified an issue with a transit provider” as the cause of the issue, and that it was working on a fix. The outage was affecting all data centers that use the transit provider.
Cloudflare is aware of network related issues caused by a third-party transit provider incident. We are working to mitigate the problem. Please follow the status page here: https://t.co/9DSYq0HIa7
— Cloudflare Help (@CloudflareHelp) August 30, 2020
Cloudflare’s services are meant to prevent websites from suffering outages due to peak traffic loads as well as DDoS or spam comment attacks. DownDetector showed Sunday’s outage was affecting the US and parts of western Europe, and sites including Discord, Hulu, Feedly, Xbox Live, and dozens of others appeared to be affected.
CenturyLink suffered a massive outage in 2018 that affected 911 calls, ATM withdrawals, lottery drawings and other services,
UPDATE August 30th 11:35AM ET: Added information about CenturyLink and detail that service appears to be restored.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/30/21407429/cloudflare-down-websites-hulu-feedly-discord