Cloudflare Outrage: What exactly happened? 

On Tuesday, a large number of websites worldwide crashed for a certain period of time. Shortly, users started getting a “500 Internal Server Error” message on their screens. Many users took to social media to cite their concerns and the disruption. It was later reported that they were able to use the websites after a brief. This was a massive global outrage caused due to an issue with the content delivery network Cloudflare that powers several popular websites. 

Cloudflare is a web performance and security company. It experienced a widespread outrage on 21 June that impacted multiple sites across the web. Since Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) and server provider, the majority of the internet becomes unavailable to the end-user if any of its systems crash or have issues. This Cloudflare outrage has impacted people across various countries of the world.  

What did Cloudflare say? 

Addressing the global concern, Cloudflare said there was an issue with the content delivery system (CDN) that faced a critical issue. The incident affected all the data plan services in its network and resulted in the “internal server error” across websites. It further added that the network faced a “critical P0 incident” that caused the servers to malfunction. A P0 incident causes interruption while users are doing certain tasks.  

In a blog post, Cloudflare explained that the outrage was caused by a change that was a part of a project to increase resilience in its data centres. “Today, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of our data centers. Unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic. This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations. Depending on your location in the world, you may have been unable to access websites and services that rely on Cloudflare,” it elaborated.  

Moreover, Cloudflare clarified that this was an error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity. 

Who was the most impacted? 

Although various websites were impacted by the global Cloudflare outrage, certain websites were most affected, especially users of online brokerage firms such as Zerodha and Upstox, who struggled to place orders.  

Addressing the concern, Zerodha advised its users to switch to a different ISP and said that a different route may work. Meanwhile, Upstox advised: “Our CDN partner, Cloudflare, is currently experiencing issues in India, due to which some of our services may be temporarily inaccessible.”  

What is a CDN and a 500 internal server error? 

A Content Delivery Network or CDN is a network of servers spread across regions that distribute content from an original server to those throughout the world. It uses cached content in a server closer to the user for distributing content quickly.  

On the other hand, a 500 internal server error is one of the most common HTTPS errors, implying something is wrong with a website’s server. The error shows up when the server is experiencing some problem, however, the root cause remains unidentified as there could be multiple reasons for that. 

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Anwesha Mishra

Anwesha has been a creative writer for a while. Currently, on her pursuit of tech writing, she is diving into the realms of technology to produce better content on the forever-changing world of technology. In her free time, you’ll find her humming tunes of her favourite shows or reading a book.

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