If your favorite website is not responding right now, it might be because of a major Cloudflare outage. Plenty of sites use Cloudflare, for instance as a CDN or a security layer to prevent attacks or fake traffic.
As it stands right now, Cloudflare states on its Status website that it continues to work on restoring its service for its customers.
The issue started at around 11:48 UTC today when Cloudflare added the first bit of information to the status page revealing that it was experiencing issues. Two hours later, the issue is ongoing.
You can check the link above to find out when the issue is resolved. Or, you can try visiting the affected websites at a later point to find out if it is resolved.
Most websites affected by the issue should show “Internal server error” with error code 500. The image should highlight that the browser and the host is working, but that Cloudflare is having an error.
Fixed as it seems for the most part since the article was written. At 14:35 UT perhaps all sites I know that depend on Cloudflare were back on track. Ghacks is back, Chipp[.]in never failed given it is Clouflare-free.
As many comments point out, this is what happens on a world-wide scale when Websites depend of a one and only, or major planetary proxy. Because Cloudflare is a proxy, whatever security it provides.
I love it when a site is self-sufficient, no connections to Cloudflare, to Google, to whatever 3rd-party server. Such places are vanishing, some remain, not many. On the other hand some sites call 3rd-party servers by dozens, for a font, a script, for ads, for tracking, for you-name–it …
Agree that this is a big problem, as these systems going down can make a large portion of the Internet disappear in an instant. Maybe, it would be a good idea to think about backup services starting up in these scenarios.
You are absolutely correct.
We should have also learned to diversify our spread rather than consolidating it into one entity.
Lessons were not learned from the many examples over the recent months and years be it aws, azure, cloudflare or whatever else.
Amazon shows dogs. About 15 different ones if you keep refeshing the page.
Seems rather Ironic that Amazon doesn’t use it’s own CDN.
oh, ghacks was affected too.
So many websites relying on services by the major US providers is the real issue…
These major US providers (Akamai, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, CloudFlare, Microsoft and a few others not in the general news) have, because of “simplicity”, “laziness” and “search results” appear to be the “best” option…
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is a well-known idiom and mostly observed in all aspects of life EXCEPT when one talks about “computer” or “internet”…
It seems that the bigger you are (whether by monetary value or “hits”) the more you trust that putting all your eggs in one basket is a GOOD thing – until…
The problem does not appear to be resolved and is occurring again on several websites. Ghacks however appears to be unaffected at this moment.
I hope everyone learns something from this.