Widespread Website Outages Impact Internet Users Sunday

OnFocus – Sunday, starting at approximately 10:03 UTC, a misconfiguration at a major external network provider caused connectivity disruptions across the Internet. Basically, this means that some websites were inaccessible to users.

“Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and providers across the Internet,” said Matthew Prince, CEO. “While we’re waiting for a post mortem from CenturyLink/Level(3), I wanted to write up the timeline of what we saw, how Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, why some of our customers were still impacted in spite of our mitigations, and what appears to be the likely root cause of the issue.” Find his write-up here.

(Essentially, Cloudflare helps carry the load of websites to prevent them from getting overwhelmed by large amounts of visitors.)

These disruptions impacted the operations of many service providers, including Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, however, some Internet properties that use Cloudflare saw increased error rates during the impact period despite mitigations.

During this period traffic dropped by about 3.5% across the Cloudflare network as well as an increase in HTTP errors which may have presented as 522 (Connection Timeout) status codes.

“Presently, we are no longer seeing additional impact at Cloudflare from these transit provider issues,” the company said. “We understand how disruptive these events can be, and we will continue to provide the latest updates for issues impacting Cloudflare’s network on cloudflarestatus.com.”

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