A move that should have boosted network resilience, according to Cloudflare, produced a large outage that affected more than a dozen of its data centers and hundreds of important online platforms and services today.
After analyzing the event, Cloudflare stated, “Today, June 21, 2022, Cloudflare had an outage that disrupted traffic in 19 of our data centers.”
“Regrettably, these 19 locations are responsible for a considerable amount of our global traffic. This disruption was triggered by a change that was implemented as part of a long-term strategy to improve resilience in our busiest sites.”
According to user reports, the full list of compromised websites and services includes, but it’s not limited to, Amazon, Twitch, Amazon Web Services, Steam, Coinbase, Telegram, Discord, DoorDash, Gitlab, and more.
Cloudflare’s busiest locations were affected by the outage.
After complaints of disruptions to Cloudflare’s network from customers and users around the world, the business began investigating the situation at roughly 06:34 AM UTC.
“Customers trying to access Cloudflare sites in the afflicted areas will receive 500 errors. The problem impacts all data plane services in our network,” Cloudflare warned.
While the incident report on Cloudflare’s system status page has no data about what caused the outage, the firm provided further information about the June 21 outage on its official blog.
The Cloudflare team stated, “This interruption was caused by a change that was part of a long-running endeavor to boost resilience in our busiest areas.”
“An outage began at 06:27 UTC due to a change in network configuration in specific sites. The first data center was brought back up at 06:58 UTC, and by 07:42 UTC, all data centers were up and running.
“Depending on where you are in the world, you may have been unable to access Cloudflare-powered websites and services. Cloudflare continues to function normally in other regions.”
Despite the fact that the affected locations account for approximately 4% of Cloudflare’s total network, their outage affected roughly 50% of all HTTP requests served by Cloudflare globally.