Internet problems at Cloudflare take down many of world's biggest services, including Discord and cryptocurrency websites

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 02 July 2019 15:32 BST
Comments
Internet problems at Cloudflare take down many of world's biggest services

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Some of the world's biggest websites and services stopped working because of a problem with the infrastructure powering the internet.

Several major websites reported problems with their services, though not all of them were immediately attributed to the problems at Cloudflare. Chat service discord, several cryptocurrency websites and even fitness platform Peloton reported problems with their services.

Several websites usually used for checking whether other services are offline – such as Down Detector and Down For Everyone Or Just Me – were also knocked offline, leaving people without any easy way of checking which services were affected.

The issue appeared to be a problem with internet company Cloudflare, which provides services necessary for those companies' websites to get online and be accessible to their users. Any problem with that underlying infrastructure can instantly take a huge set of websites down.

As such, the Cloudflare issue likely affected vast swathes of the internet.

"Aware of major Cloudflare issues impacting us network wide," co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince posted on Twitter. "Team is working on getting to the bottom of what’s going on. Will continue to update."

He later said the issue had been found but that websites were still coming back online.

"Appear to have mitigated the issue causing the outage," he wrote. "Traffic restored. Working now to restore all services globally. More details to come as we have them."

A note on Cloudflare's status website gave much the same information.

"Cloudflare has implemented a fix for this issue and is currently monitoring the results," it currently reads. "We will update the status once the issue is resolved."

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in