No, the internet isn’t broken — but a massive outage of a major website security company caused dozens of apps and websites to shut down.
Discord, DoorDash, Postmates, Minecraft, Google, Spectrum and countless other websites crashed for some people as Cloudflare glitched, news outlets report.
“Services that rely on Cloudflare for DNS and caching to help them stay online are currently inaccessible for many people,” Engadget reported.
Cloudflare is “one of the biggest networks operating on the internet,” the company said. Websites use it to increase their security.
“More than 27 million Internet properties are on Cloudflare, and our network is growing by tens of thousands each day,” the company said on its website. “Cloudflare powers Internet requests for ~13{cb3fe4c54de06d7c4b8dceae281fb32e521027d1659af7adec2f427d2f5333d9} of the Fortune 1,000 for more than 1 billion unique IP addresses per day.”
Cloudflare is investigating issues with Cloudflare Resolver and our edge network in certain locations. Updates will be available here: https://t.co/4ZKXVdaN5F
— Cloudflare Help (@CloudflareHelp) July 17, 2020
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue and said it is working to fix the bug.
“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” Cloudflare said.
Because of Cloudflare’s massive network, some people on social media thought “half the internet was down.”