Websites go down globally as outage hits internet infrastructure company Cloudflare – Tech

Disruptions in internet access were widely reported on Tuesday as Cloudflare, a content delivery network and domain name server (DNS) service, reported it was experiencing issues in its global network.

“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare dashboard and API (application programming interface) also failing. We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” the service provider said in an update at 5:03pm.

In an update at 5:21pm, it said: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

In an update posted at 6:09pm, it said the issue was identified and a fix was being implemented.

NetBlocks, a global internet watchdog, also said that a wide range of online services were currently experiencing disruptions due to a technical issue affecting Cloudflare’s global network. It added that the incident was not related to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering”.

Downdetector showed that user reports from Pakistan indicated problems with Cloudflare, with complaints beginning around 4:10 pm. Problems were also reported with OpenAI, Amazon Web Services and Facebook.

Social media platform X was also down for thousands of users in the United States and worldwide, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

There were more than 11,500 reports of issues with the social media platform as of 6:41am ET, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.

It was not immediately clear whether the outages were related.

X and Cloudflare did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Cloudflare had also reported a “widespread outage” in June 2022 and several popular websites were unreachable.

A DNS server is an address book that matches a website’s name (e.g. http://google.com) to its real IP (a set of numbers). For nationwide use, you need DNS servers that can handle a lot of traffic and respond fast.