An outage at Cloudflare on 21 June led to many websites worldwide being inaccessible, Canva, Zerodha and Discord being some of the sites affected.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue on Twitter, and posted updates regarding the status of the outage. According to the latest update at 1:38 pm, the issue seems to have been resolved for most websites affected.
During the outage, most users received a "500 Internal Server Error" when trying to access the page, or any specific related pages to the main site that was down. In one of the updates explaining the issue, Cloudflare mentioned, "the incident impacts all data plane services in our network."
Cloudflare is a popular content delivery network, which is a group of servers working together to deliver content on the internet at quick speeds. Content delivery networks are used by a majority of sites as they aid in smooth web service and increased internet security.
Websites Affected
According to Down Detector, a site that keeps track of webpage outages, sites like Shopify, Zerodha, and the popular battle royale shooting title Valorant were down at the same time, a likely effect of the Cloudflare outage.
Amazon Web Services and Twitter were also affected, along with Udemy, Splunk, Quora, DoorDash, Upstox, Groww and Crunchyroll. Some crypto exchanges, like Coinbase, WazirX, Bitfinex, among others had also been affected by the outage.
Most of the mentioned websites are now operational again.
Why It Happened
The outage affected traffic in 19 data centers which handle a significant proportion of our global traffic.
This outage, Cloudflare says, was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in its busiest locations.
"Over the last 18 months, Cloudflare has been working to convert all of our busiest locations to a more flexible and resilient architecture. In this time, we’ve converted 19 of our data centers to this architecture," the company said in a blog post.
"As these locations also carry a significant proportion of the Cloudflare traffic, any problem here can have a very wide impact, and unfortunately, that’s what happened today," it added.
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