Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected.
Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify and League of Legends were all affected, giving an idea of the breadth of the issue. Not only were websites down but also some status pages meant to provide warnings and track outages.
The DNS, or Domain Name System, is an integral part of the web, connecting domains (like TechCrunch.com) to their IP addresses (such as 152.195.50.33). If it goes down, it doesn’t matter whether a website’s servers are working or not — users can’t even reach the site or service in the first place. Internet providers usually have their own, but Google’s has existed for many years, and Cloudflare launched its own in late 2018.
Cloudflare wrote in a tweet and an update to its own status page (which thankfully remained available) that it was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Resolver and our edge network in certain locations. Customers using Cloudflare services in certain regions are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed.”
Some of the services and sites also relied on Google’s Public DNS service (8.8.8.8), which appeared to be having simultaneous issues, but TechCrunch has not been able to directly confirm this. Google shows no interruption to services on its status dashboard.
This story is developing — check back for updates.
