In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Cloudflare — one of the world’s largest internet networks — was down, causing outages in websites across the internet.
The news: The outage started around 06:58 Coordinated Universal Time, and all servers were back online by 07:42 UTC, according to a statement made by Cloudflare.
- During this time, 19 Cloudflare servers were out. These servers handle a “significant portion” of global traffic, the company said.
What sites were down? This loss of connectivity affected big name websites, such as Doordash, Discord, Fitbit, NordVPN and Peloton, according to CNET.
- Mashable reported that Google and Amazon services were down as well.
Why did the outage happen? Cloudflare says “this outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations.” It was a change in those network configurations in those locations that caused the outage.
- “We are very sorry for this outage,” Cloudflare said. “This was our error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity.”
What is Cloudflare? “Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, nonprofits, bloggers and anyone with an internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare,” the company’s website says.
- Cloudflare’s technology works through an edge network, connecting your network to servers as close as possible, which creates a more reliable connection that is less likely to crash due to large amounts of activity.