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A range of websites and popular Internet services went down this morning, due to an identified problem at web performance company Clouflare. The issue hit a selection of sites and services, including Discord, Shopify, Peloton and Fitbit. The widespread web outage was due to what Cloudflare reported as a “service issue”.
According to The Verge, the issue began at around 2:30 am ET, with Cloudflare taking to Twitter to acknowledge that it had identified an issue. A fix was being implemented by 3:20 am ET, as services began to return to normal.
Discord also took to Twitter to explain the issue, making light of the situation and reassuring users that services would be back operating normally.
However, users of Cloudflare’s own DNS service, 1.1.1.1 were seemingly unable to connect to any sites unless switching back to their ISP’s original settings.
At the time of writing, Cloudflare’s status page reports ‘all services are operational’. Although Downdetector was still reporting some issues for services that were affected by the outage – and you can still see some issues ongoing at Cloudflare.
Unfortunately, although there’s no suggestion of foul play causing today’s disruption, it’s not the first incident in recent times the company has had to deal with. It saw off a record-breaking HTTPS DDoS attack attempt earlier this month, on June 14th. The attempt flooded 26 million requests per second in an attempt to take Cloudflare services offline.
That was after a previous record-breaking attempt to impact Cloudflare’s services reported back in April.
Clearly, it’s not surprising that a company offering widespread support to online services can impact them directly with an issue. But such outages still range from inconvenient to pretty problematic given the huge list of companies Cloudflare supports.
Thankfully, it seems we can start getting back to Discord messages where we discuss having already broken our 10,000 step goal on Fitbit for through the pacing up and down we’ve been doing.