Lyra Martin Tech 06.21.2022 11:Jun AM EDT

Cloudflare Internet Outage Shuts Websites Across the World Today

Cloudflare and its rival CDN experienced another outage after having two similar issues last year.

Discord, Shopify, and other websites went down after Cloudflare's outage issues on Tuesday, June 21.

The internet outage was resolved by Cloudflare immediately after it aroused.

Discord, Shopify, and Other Websites Went Down - Error Messages Appear

The content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company that powers much of the web, known as Cloudflare, have experienced outage issues today at around 8 in the morning. As a result of this internet outage, many websites over the world, including the messaging platform Discord, and Shopify, were knocked down.

Those who visited particular sites were welcomed with error messages instead. Since several sites depend on the company to serve their media and information users, Cloudflare's issues quickly affected others as many sites went unconnected today.

The website of the unincorporated association, which consists of the passenger train operating companies of England, Scotland, and Wales, known as National Rail Enquiries, has also briefly gone offline. The association may have been affected by the issues Cloudflare has faced. However, on the first day of rail strikes across Britain, the Rail Enquiries is also experiencing a surge in demand for journey information.

Cloudflare and CDN Experienced Similar Incidents Last Year

Later after the outage had commenced, Cloudflare said on its website, "Eyeballs attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors." Fortunately, they quickly figured out the source of the problem and started doing necessary amendments soon after the content delivery network announced the said issue.

Back in June and July 2021, Cloudflare has reportedly encountered two issues relevant to what they have experienced earlier this day. The company underwent a huge DNS outage in July last year, eventually affecting Feedly, Tumblr, Discord, League of Legends, and more.

In last year's problem, Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince told DCD that the company did not give up on fixing the second outage to live up to its objective of building Cloudflare, which is to help make a better internet.

Also, last year, Cloudflare's rival company CDN reported a bug that was triggered by a single valid customer configuration change, and a patch has since been rolled out. The said company's issue has also brought almost half of the internet down for several hours.

The shares of CDN jumped as investors realized how significant the business was to the stability of the web after the outage. Cloudflare's share, on the other hand, did not change due to its minor outage and is currently at an all-time high.

By 9 am UK time (4 am in US time), the Down Detector showed many websites starting to come back online. When the outage roused, Cloudflare said that the incident was considered "resolved" and that they would fix the problems immediately. They did not give details on what caused the issues and what had fixed them.