Many websites are facing serious access problems, as well as , as well as , as Cloudflare – the company that provides protection and traffic management services to hundreds of thousands of domains – is currently facing an extensive technical problem.
The company confirmed that it is investigating “an issue that may affect many customers”, but did not yet give a clear timetable for a remediation. At one point, even its own status website was down, making it difficult to keep users informed.
The update from Cloudflare
This event comes just a month after similar problems faced a third of the internet, which relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In a more recent update, the network stressed that “we are seeing service recover, but customers may continue to experience higher than normal error rates as we continue restoration efforts.” “We are continuing to investigate the issue,” Cloudflare added.
In essence, Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy and a massive Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means that it intervenes between the user and the origin server of a web page. When a visitor requests access to a website, Cloudflare serves them copies of the static content (images, CSS, JavaScript) from its nearest server, drastically reducing load time.
“We are continuing to investigate this matter.”
What caused this crisis, which internet experts are still concerned about, is a sudden, avalanche error in the decades-old protocols that underpin the entire internet.
And the very serious question that arises is one: Could the internet be shut down?
A Cloudflare spokesperson said: “We saw an increase in unusual traffic on one of Cloudflare’s services as of 11:20am. This caused errors in traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network. While most traffic for most services continued to flow normally, there were increased errors on many Cloudflare services.
“We do not yet know the cause of the increase in unusual traffic. We work to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual increase in traffic.”
Scheduled maintenance work
Cloudflare engineers had planned to perform maintenance work on Tuesday at data centers in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago, Chile, but it was unclear if their activities were related to the outage.
As the company tries to fix the problem, it has disabled an encryption service called Warp in London, saying: “Users in London trying to access the internet through Warp will see a connection failure.”
Cloudflare has been described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” by Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Cyber Security Centre. The company says it provides services to “protect your websites, apps, APIs, and AI workloads while accelerating performance.”
Woodward described it to the Guardian as a “watchdog” and added that its services include monitoring website traffic so they are protected against malware and visitors.
