Categories: Tech & Society

CloudFlare Down For An Hour, Takes Down 785,000 Websites

CloudFlare, the popular cloud-based service for security and caching was down for close to an hour due to an issue with its edge routers. As the service adds a layer between 785,000 websites and their users in order to speed up traffic and prevent DDoS attacks and other security issues, all of those websites were affected. Popular websites like 4chan, metallica.com, wikileaks, etc. were down.

The company’s own website and status page were down, giving an Error 502. The Twitter status account was its only communication channel still available.

The team at CloudFlare does a 24X7 monitoring but the servers crashed in such a way that the servers had to be manually rebooted. It means calling all the data centers around the world and reverting the rule. The DNS and proxy servers were perfectly fine, they were just unreachable.

The company wrote a post-mortem as well.

CloudFlare generates so many pageviews that it would be the 10th website in the world. Back in September, the company announced at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that it served 70 billion monthly pageviews to 600 million unique visitors. Prince corrected that number and claimed that the service now serves “well over 100 billion pageviews” every month.

Prince thought about CloudFlare’s paying customers as well and the company will act accordingly to make up for the outage: “We are extremely disappointed and we’ll definitely be honoring our paying customers.”

Team TechPanda

View Comments

  • I have two blogs, my own and one belongs to the company i work with, both are being served through cloudflare, both are working fine, no issues.

Recent Posts

Empowering businesses with Unified Device Management: Streamline security & productivity across platforms

In a modern business, device diversity is not just an operational reality; it is the…

8 hours ago

Can taxes cool down AI & crypto’s power hunger? The IMF’s betting on it

We already know that because of the electricity used by high-powered equipment to “mine” crypto…

1 day ago

All our eggs in one cloud: When AWS sneezed & the Internet caught a cold

The recent service outage that Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced in the US brought several…

4 days ago

Can AI help manage the new threat to our environment caused by AI?

Can we make data centers smart and green? Warning about AI’s electricity consumption speed was…

5 days ago

New tech on the block: Fintech, crypto, cleantech, blockchain & cybersecurity

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent tech launches. Fintech: ICICI Bank & Visa…

1 week ago