Internet: Was Not Under “Attack” During Global Outage, Says Cloudflare DNS; Sites & Services Starting To Stabilize

The Internet is actually not under siege and you can still watch Netflix over the weekend, it turns out – though it certainly felt like the digital world had collapsed to PONG levels for a while today.

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NEWS PROVIDED BY deadline ⮕ JUL 17, 2020, 15:30 ET

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ST. LOUIS, July.17, 2020 /MateFit/ -- There are still some dark spots out there, and some sites proving a little rickety, but one of the main providers of the routers that connect domains to their actual IP addresses says they have identified the problem and are watching out for more problems.

“This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack,” said Cloudflare DNS on their blog just a few minutes ago after over an hour of interruption earlier Friday. “It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are monitoring systems for stability now.”

 

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Good to know.

As a firestorm blazed over the Internet being essentially down across the world, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince also went online in the past few minutes to precisely identify the issues coming out of a router in Atlanta “that resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone.” He added: “Everything is restored now and we’re looking into the root cause.”

Certainly, as coronavirus cases continue to surge in the United States and citizens are being urged again to stay at home while politicians contemplate possible new quarantine mandates, losing the Internet would untether many right now.

PREVIOUSLY, 3:15 PM: First it was Twitter VIPs getting hacked earlier this week and today large swaths of the Internet itself went down for a while.

An outage of the Cloudflare DNS service saw websites and connections all over the globe DOA for almost an hour this afternoon. The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” said the widely used web-infrastructure and website-security company about 10 minutes ago on its status page.

The intermittent outage ranges from LA to Amsterdam with the heavily subscribed Amazon Web Services and media sites like Politico and others dark or frozen at times.

“Customers using Cloudflare services in certain regions are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed,” Cloudflare declared earlier in the day. “Data Centers impacted include: SJC, DFW, SEA, LAX, ORD, IAD, EWR, ATL, LHR, AMS, FRA, CDG,” they added using city and country airport codes.

 

 

Across the digital landscape, Internet data analysis firm Downdetector saw plugs being figuratively pulled everywhere:

It appears that Google’s own Public Domain Name System is also taking on some fire and not function up to expectations. However, that outage seems to be much more sporadic, at least right now.

We will update this story as it develops, if we can get online then.