Cloudflare goes down, and takes the internet's security blanket with it

When Cloudflare has problems, the rest of the internet can't be that far behind.

The company whose entire raison d'être is ensuring the reliability of companies' websites and internet-connected services had a bit of online trouble itself Friday. In a late afternoon statement, the company confirmed that at least some of its clients were having a bad day.

"We are aware that some regions may be experiencing issues with some Cloudflare services," announced the company. "We are currently investigating."

We reached out to Cloudfare in an effort to determine what, specifically, had gone wrong and how many clients were affected. We received no immediate response. However, a company status page provided some vital insight.

"This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network," read the statement. "It was not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available."

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The company added that it believed the "root cause" of the outage had been addressed.

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At the time of this writing, Downdetector (which is owned by Mashable's parent company J2) showed Cloudflare's issues concentrated in the U.S. and northern Europe.

Ouch. Credit: screenshot / downdetector

While Cloudflare struggled to get its services fully functioning again, the internet delighted in the sight of a company that sells DDoS protection not being able to keep itself online — and, correspondingly, much of the internet struggling as a result.

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Services like Discord where among those reporting problems — likely as a result of Cloudflare's outages.

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This is not the first time Cloudfare has run into trouble. In 2017, the company reported "observing network performance issues."

UPDATE: July 17, 2020, 3:19 p.m. PDT: This story has been updated to include a statement from Cloudflare denying that Friday's issues were a result of an attack.