Cloud computing services company, Cloudflare suffered an outage which has resulted in millions of websites going down across the world.
The company provides computing and website security services to a lot of websites across the globe which is why millions of websites were showing the “502 Bad Gateway” error.
Even The Quint’s website was down for a while. It’s back online now!
One cryptocurrency site was also impacted which caused a minor panic by falsely showing people that the price of Bitcoin had plummeted.
Free gaming voice chat platform, Discord also went down with reports of users hit with a 502 bad gateway error flooding forums.
Even independent outage monitor, Down Detector was down which meant that people were not able to check whether their website was down or not.
Some of the regions affected according to online buzz were China, India, parts of Europe and US as well.
‘Not an Attack,’ Says Cloudflare, Apologises
In its initial response, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that the team is working towards solving the problem.
“Aware of major @Cloudflare issues impacting us network wide. Team is working on getting to the bottom of what’s going on. Will continue to update,” he tweeted.
However, on its official Twitter handle, Cloudflare later issued a statement in a placeholder blog saying that it was not an attack as being claimed by many. Here’s what the statement said:
“This is a short placeholder blog and will be replaced with a full post-mortem and disclosure of what happened today.
For about 30 minutes today, visitors to Cloudflare sites received 502 errors caused by a massive spike in CPU utilization on our network. This CPU spike was caused by a bad software deploy that was rolled back. Once rolled back the service returned to normal operation and all domains using Cloudflare returned to normal traffic levels.
This was not an attack (as some have speculated) and we are incredibly sorry that this incident occurred. Internal teams are meeting as I write performing a full post-mortem to understand how this occurred and how we prevent this from ever occurring again.”
‘Internet Is a Bad Place,’ Say Twitterati
Though many websites suffered outage, Twitter was up and running as ‘Twitterati’ took to the platform to report the problem.
It seems most of the websites that were affected are back online.
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