Cloudflare was suffering an outage Sunday morning that appeared to be affecting multiple websites.
Widespread internet outages were reported across both the United States and Europe on Sunday.
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, which indicates an issue with the server. In a later update Cloudflare said it had “identified an issue with a transit provider” as the cause of the issue, and that it was working on a fix. The outage was affecting all data centers that use the transit provider.
Cloudflare is aware of network related issues caused by a third-party transit provider incident. We are working to mitigate the problem. Please follow the status page here: https://t.co/9DSYq0HIa7
— Cloudflare Help (@CloudflareHelp) August 30, 2020
Cloudflare’s services are meant to prevent websites from suffering outages due to peak traffic loads as well as DDoS or spam comment attacks. DownDetector showed Sunday’s outage was affecting the US and parts of western Europe, and sites including Discord, Hulu, Feedly, and dozens of others appeared to be affected. We’ll be updating this story as the situation evolves.
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
The company blamed the outage internet provider CenturyLink for taking down Cloudflare and thereby its customers.
“Today, we saw a widespread internet outage online that impacted multiple providers,” Cloudflare’s spokeswoman Laurel Toney said.
“Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”
It’s the second major outage Cloudflare has experienced in recent weeks. In mid-July, the company experienced a fatal router error that brought down not only its own operations, but a large chunk of the internet.