A storm threatens the clouds of the Internet, because they fall every now and then without us knowing very well why. Tonight Cloudflare went offline for about three hoursleaving thousands of websites offline, including very important services such as LinkedIn and Zoom.
Cloudflare offers security and reverse proxy services from none other than 20% of all the websites that exist. This is the second time it has suffered a blackout in recent weeks, and in both cases it appears to have been due to errors in an updatewhich is quite incomprehensible.
Cloudflare It is a critical Internet service, because if it goes down it drags down millions of websites to which it protects its IP address from DDoS attacks and malware.
As you can see in this graph from DownDetector, Cloudflare went down between 9:30 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. yesterday, Friday.. The graph collects user incidents. When there is a large peak, there is a service outage:
Why Cloudflare crashed for the second time
As confirmed by Cloudflare itself, the cloud went down while they were doing an updateaffecting 28% of all the websites they protect. They fixed the problem in 25 minutes, although it took a couple of hours for users to recover 100%, as seen in the graph.
As Cloudflare explains on its blog, «The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack on Cloudflare systems or any malicious activity. It was triggered by changes being made to our parsing logic as we attempted to detect and mitigate a widespread vulnerability in the industry.»
Come on, it was his mistake. At least they recognize it and have apologized, something that is unusual: “Any interruption of our systems is unacceptable, and we know that we have once again let the Internet down after the incident on November 18.”
The worrying thing, as they say, is that This is the second blackout in two weeks. The previous one was also due to a configuration error. It is not acceptable that these outages occur due to a simple error in a file, when that means leaving millions of websites without Internet.
To the poor Cloudflare customers, when LaLiga is not boycotting them, it is the company itself…
The cloud is having a bad streak. In recent weeks, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure have also gone down, leaving critical services offline, from Microsoft apps to Reddit, Starbucks or Spotify.