Major Cloudflare outage takes down Discord, Postmates, and other sites

By Digital Trends Staff Published July 17, 2020

Internet service giant Cloudflare suffered an outage Friday afternoon, knocking out service to many websites and services, including popular chat app Discord.

According to the Cloudflare’s System Status page, the web services provider was suffering “network and resolver issues.”

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“This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network,” Cloudflare told Digital Trends in a 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. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are monitoring systems for stability now.”

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said that the issue was traced back to problems with a router in Atlanta.

We isolated the Atlanta router and shut down our backbone, routing traffic across transit providers instead. There was some congestion that caused slow performance on some links as the logging caught up. Everything is restored now and we're looking into the root cause. 2/2

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 17, 2020

The incident began around 2:30 p.m. PT, with sites across the internet dropping offline for some users.

“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” Cloudflare wrote about 15 minutes after the outage began.

Discord, Patreon, and other major websites and services were reportedly knocked down by the outage.

According to Downdetector, users were also reporting issues with DoorDash, League of Legends, Postmates, Shopify, and even Google in connection with the Cloudflare outage.

According to Cloudflare, the outage affected its data centers in the United States and parts of western Europe. The company has more than 180 data centers worldwide, and says more than 16 million internet properties use the platform.

Digital Trends reached out to Cloudflare for comment. We will update this story when we hear back.

Last year, Cloudflare experienced a roughly 30-minute outage that brought down sites around the world.

This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.

Digital Trends Staff

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