A second Cloudflare outage in two weeks has taken multiple sites and services down, including Discord, OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, and CoinDesk. Affected apps and websites were either unable to properly load or showed a “502 Gateway Error.” Ironically, even the site DownDetector, which is commonly used to check web service disruptions, was affected.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a tweet that the outage is not due to an attack but a server overload. “Massive spike in CPU usage caused primary and backup systems to fall over,” he wrote, adding that the company is still investigating the root cause.
Massive spike in CPU usage caused primary and backup systems to fall over. Impacted all services. No evidence yet attack related. Shut down service responsible for CPU spike and traffic back to normal levels. Digging in to root cause.
— Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) July 2, 2019
As part of the outage, CoinDesk temporarily showed incorrect cryptocurrency prices, erroneously citing bitcoin as being worth $26. (Bitcoin had soared above $10,000 over the course of June, and it had been downturning below that valuation before this morning.)
ALERT: Due to a cloudflare outage, we’re getting bad data from our providers, which is showing incorrect crypto prices. Calm down everyone, Bitcoin is not $26.
— CoinDesk (@coindesk) July 2, 2019
Cloudflare has implemented a fix, and services are starting to come back online, though connection may still be intermittent. The company did not say whether the outage is related to the one on June 24th when Prince publicly blamed Verizon’s network routing issue as the culprit.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/20678958/downdetector-down-cloudflare-502-gateway-error-discord-outage