The correct change would have been to deactivate the term instead of the prefix-list. Cloudflare provides DNS and CDN services and powers approximately “40% of the internet.”. Updated 0943 GMT (1743 HKT) August 31, 2020. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. We’ve never experienced an outage on our backbone and our team responded quickly to restore service in the affected locations, but this was a very painful period for everyone involved. April 16, 2020 1:28AM. On July 18th, 2020, a configuration error in Cloudflare’s backbone network caused an outage for about 27 minutes affecting businesses worldwide. As part of planned maintenance at one of our core data centers, we instructed technicians to remove all the equipment in one of our cabinets. @unfiltered123 The Cloudflare outage, caused by Microsoft Excel or similar spreadsheet programs. Level 3/CenturyLink was responsible for an outage that affected many Internet services, including Cloudflare. Today a configuration error in our backbone network caused an outage for Internet properties and Cloudflare services that lasted 27 minutes. Shortly after, we saw congestion at one of our core data centers that processes logs and metrics, causing some logs to be dropped. As shown, Akamai had several query spikes in the states due to the Cloudflare performance drop – the system is actively swapping over to Akamai. Scheduled - On October 20, 2020, Cloudflare will perform a SSL/TLS Management services failover and failback between primary core datacenter and secondary core datacenter. This is the period of the outage. This change has been deployed following the incident. Process: While sending our technicians instructions to retire hardware, we should call out clearly the cabling that should not be touched. The maintenance window will start on Oct 20, 2020 from 18:30 UTC and will end on Oct 20, 2020 22:30 UTC. We've talked about website downtime causes and solutions in the past, and there are just so many factors that can bring a website off the grid. These links allow us to carry traffic between different data centers, without going over the public Internet. According to a tweet from CenturyLink, all affected services have been restored as of 11:15AM ET. At 14:12 UTC, approximately 19 hours and 30 minutes after it had been shut down, connectivity was returned.... Making any configuration changes (such as changing a DNS record), Running automated Load Balancing health checks, Creating or maintaining Argo Tunnel connections, Transferring domains to Cloudflare Registrar, Logging information from edge services (customers will see a gap in log data). The cause of this outage was deployment of a single misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)... Last Friday, Tavis Ormandy from Google’s Project Zero contacted Cloudflare to report a security problem with our edge servers. All security services, such as our Web Application Firewall, continued to work normally. 17 Jul 2020. Kaspersky Lab, a multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider based in Moscow, Russia, displayed an unusual amount of botnet activity on its Cybermap, which keeps track of data traveling around the globe. Downdetector lists a number of sites and services being unavailable including Discord, Spectrum Internet, Shopify, AT&T, and Amazon Web Services. August 30th 2020: Analysis of CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and … Unfortunately at the time, local routes that the edge routers received from our compute nodes had a local-preference of 100. Although not entirely catastrophic thanks to the architecture design, but many locations with heavy internet usage were affected including San Jose, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, São Paulo, and the list goes on. I've been monitoring through https://t.co/xvLSDEZIUk and it's a *lot* of sites #outage pic.twitter.com/giOuooNegf — Jeff Geerling (@geerlingguy) July 17, 2020 A website without a backup plan is exactly like sailing a cruise without liferafts – you’re betting you won’t need it. Cloudflare is aware of network related issues caused by a third-party transit provider incident. We saw traffic drop by about 50% across our network. Get notified of new posts: Subscription confirmed. We are working to mitigate the problem. This is a wake-up call reminding all businesses will eventually have to deal with outages if offering any form of web services. Small or medium businesses might have room for mistakes, but some of the bigger companies affected by the outage such as Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify, and League of Legends might not be so lucky. “Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted many multiple providers,” a Cloudflare representative said in an email to The Verge. Because of the architecture of our backbone this outage didn’t affect the entire Cloudflare network and was localized to certain geographies. I've been monitoring through https://t.co/xvLSDEZIUk and it's a *lot* of sites #outage pic.twitter.com/giOuooNegf, — Jeff Geerling (@geerlingguy) July 17, 2020, The term DDOS began to trend across Twitter as sites went down, referring to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack. When the outage occurred, the AI Load Balancing swapped out Cloudflare with the next best-performing CDN (varies in different regions) for requests. This was a backup link with 10Gbps of connectivity.At 1951 UTC we restored the first of four large links to the Internet.At 1952 UTC the Cloudflare Dashboard and API became available.At 2016 UTC the second of four links was restored.At 2019 UTC the third of four links was restored.At 2031 UTC fully-redundant connectivity was restored. Aug. 30, 2020 Status overview Comments Unable to display this content to due missing consent. And our job at mlytics is to help our customers minimize the exposure of such risk and maximize the uptime at all times. Cloudflare is one of the many CDNs mlytics offer via Power-Ups (CDN marketplace) on the platform. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices Copyright S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates. For the avoidance of doubt: this was not caused by an attack or breach of any kind. Almost nine years ago, Cloudflare was a tiny company and I was a customer not an employee. As the higher local-preference wins, all of the traffic meant for local compute nodes went to Atlanta compute nodes instead. The red and orange region at the top shows CPU utilization in Atlanta reaching overload, and the white regions show affected data centers seeing CPU drop to near zero as they were no longer handling traffic. Statistics for Data Science and Business Analysis, a configuration error in Cloudflare’s backbone network. We are sorry for this outage and have already made a global change to the backbone configuration that will prevent it from being able to occur again. We take this incident very seriously, and recognize the magnitude of impact it had. Here’s a view of the impact from Cloudflare’s internal traffic manager tool. Remote work leads to growing concerns over cybersecurity. These are some of the most used online services today, and imagine millions of users got disconnected without being informed. This had successfully helped many of our customers mitigated the outage, and we received no complaints over the course. Other locations continued to operate normally. This quickly overwhelmed the Atlanta router and caused Cloudflare network locations connected to the backbone to fail. The outage began early Sunday, and according to Cloudflare’s status page, it was seeing “an increased level of HTTP 5xx class errors,” such as 522 and 503. We’ve already made changes to the backbone configuration to make sure that this cannot happen again, and further changes will resume on Monday. But stopping users from doing what they were doing (especially if they enjoy it so much) is your express train ticket to PR hell. The outage struck at quite a few Cloudflare data centers at the same time. The error configuration sent all traffic across the backbone to Cloudflare’s Atlanta node and unfortunately “overwhelmed” the router. We understand how important these services are to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this outage caused. This gave us global control and the ability to see issues in any of our network locations in more than 200 cities worldwide. Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting. The Cloudflare engineering team were, Graham-Cumming said in the admirably transparent posting, working on an issue with a segment of the network backbone and updated a … April 16, 2020 1:28AM Outage. We believe all the CDN providers are doing their best to deliver the best performance possible, but unfortunately, things do happen. In this case, we’re using a demo site with Akamai and Cloudflare installed. — Cloudflare Help (@CloudflareHelp) July 17, 2020 Despite much speculation as to the cause of the outage, there is no evidence that it was caused by … With the backbone, we have far greater control over where and how to route Internet requests and traffic than the public Internet provides. Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”. Change the BGP local-preference for local server routes.