Massive Outage Hits Cloudflare

A major outage has reportedly struck Cloudflare, a website-security company that caters to an array of websites, shutting down a large chunk of the Internet, including the popular chat service Discord.

Users of Discord, Riot Games, Patreon, Gitlab and various others websites have reported problems with accessing the platforms after Cloudflare, the US-based company that offers DDoS protection to its customers, reportedly came under a distributed denial of service cyber attack itself.

In a statement released shortly after disgruntled users started flocking to Twitter, which itself is still reeling from a major security breach, Cloudflare has confirmed that it had been having an “issue.”

“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

It’s unclear what caused Cloudflare to malfunction. However, the incident has immediately triggered speculations of a possible cyber attack or a major internal failure.

About an hour after the first reports about the sweeping outage came about, Discord reported that it was getting back online.

“Users are beginning to be able to connect, and the upstream internet issues appear to be recovering.”

Downdector, a website that tracks outage of online services and sites, has also been affected by the blackout, leaving concerned netizens that rushed to the site to confirm the reports in the dark.

The reported glitch has apparently blindsided the customers of Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify Inc., many of whom have taken to Twitter to air their grievances. 

Some have made no attempt to conceal their frustrations, with Canadian actor and author William Shatner claiming he has been “losing million of dollars every minute in potential sales!” 

His comment (although, apparently made in jest) has failed to strike a chord with some of the commentators, however. 

Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare Matthew Prince stated on Twitter that the issue which brought a large portion of the web to a screeching halt appeared to be a router error. 

“It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone,” Prince said.

He added that the company had instead rerouted the traffic “across transit provides,” which ultimately led to “some congestion that caused slow performance on some links.”

Cloudflare has already fixed the issue, but is looking “into the root cause” of the problem,” he noted.

The disruption at Cloudflare comes just two days after some 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were breached in a hacking attack that forced them to promote a bitcoin scam. The breach was made possible after hackers got access to an employees’ internal panel.

Twitter has vowed to step up security, locking down thousands of vulnerable accounts, notably those sporting blue verification check-marks, as a precaution.