Cloudflare, a company providing performance and security to websites, experienced network problems, which forced them to take down a lot of its subscribers’ sites and apps on Monday.
Popular chat service Discord experienced issues on Monday, due to network problems at Cloudflare.
Due to these two technical issues, access to several popular websites, both Bangladeshi and international, such as news portals, social networking blogs and other websites, was blocked for a significant amount of time, as reported by popular tech news portals Verge and TechCrunch.
According to Cloudflare, over 16 million Internet sites utilize their services for performance enhancement, DDoS mitigation, or other features. Due to this an outage can have a large impact on the entire Internet.
The app was inaccessible for its millions of users, and even Discord’s website and status pages were struggling. Discord’s problems could be traced to an outage at Cloudflare, a content delivery network.
Cloudflare started experiencing issues at 7:43am local time, and this caused Discord, Feedly, Crunchyroll, and many other sites that rely on its services to have partial outages.
Cloudflare says it’s working on a "possible route leak" affecting some of its network, but services like Discord have been inaccessible for nearly 45 minutes now. "Discord is affected by the general internet outage," says a Discord statement on the company’s status site. "Hang tight. Pet your cats."
"This leak is impacting many internet services including Cloudflare," says a Cloudflare spokesperson. "We are continuing to work with the network provider that created this route leak to remove it."
Cloudflare doesn’t name the network involved, but Verizon is also experiencing widespread issues across the East Coast of the US this morning. Cloudflare notes that "the network responsible for the route leak has now fixed the issue," so services should start to return to normal shortly.
Cloudfare explained the outage in an additional statement, commenting that "Earlier today, a widespread BGP routing leak affected a number of Internet services and a portion of traffic to Cloudflare.
All of Cloudflare’s systems continued to run normally, but traffic wasn’t getting to us for a portion of our domains. At this point, the network outage has been fixed and traffic levels are returning to normal."
