Internet Down: Cloudflare Outage Impacts Several Popular Websites

There was a major internet outage as many websites all over the world showed the "error 500" and users had been reporting the "500 Internal Server Error". The outage was due to an issue that affected Cloudflare, the content delivery network (CDN). Some people could not understand the impact of the outage on the DownDetector, which helps in tracking internet outages globally.

Cloudflare acknowledged the disruption and has also implemented a fix soon after the outage was reported by users on social media. Notably, the US firm Cloudflare provides distributed denial-of-service protection to online domains, various cybersecurity services, and speed optimization.

Sites Affected By Cloudflare Outage

On Tuesday morning, a slew of websites and online services were down due to the Cloudflare outage. The affected websites include Feedly, Cloudflare itself, Zerodha, Discord, DoorDash, Crunchyroll, Omegle, NordVPN, Shopify, Quora, Amazon Web Services, Twitter, Canva, Airtel, Udemy, Splunk, Coinbase, WazirX, and others. Besides them, even the popular battle royale shooting title Valorant and Minecraft were down.

What's more, some users were not able to access even DownDetector due to the outage. As the fix has been implemented, most of these websites are now up and running for almost all users. Discord took to its status website to confirm that it has started working fine globally after an hour of reporting the outage.

Latest Update On Cloudflare Outage

As per the latest update available on the Cloudflare Status website, a "critical P0 incident" was declared at noon and it disrupted Cloudflare's network in broad regions. Furthermore, it stated that the outage impacted all data plane services in its network, thereby resulting in 500 errors across all websites and services that use the CDN.

Notably, the Cloudflare CDN powers a majority of websites and services worldwide. A report by W3Techs, a Web technology survey firm revealed that Cloudflare leads the market of CDNs and surpasses competitors such as Amazon CloudFront and Akamai. This domination among the competitors is the reason for the mass outage of a large number of websites and services, it notes. The scope and scale of the operations of Cloudflare is the prime reason for the network outage and it has made people like the whole internet is down.