Dozens of Websites, Apps Go Down in Major Cloudflare Outage

Dozens of popular websites and Internet apps are down on Sunday after Cloudflare, an Internet service that tries to keep websites up, went down.

“Cloudflare is aware of network related issues caused by a third-party transit provider incident. We are working to mitigate the problem. Please follow the status page here,” it said on Aug. 30. A spokesperson for Cloudflare also confirmed the outage.

“Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted multiple providers,” said Laurel Toney, spokeswoman for Cloudflare, according to CNN. “Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”

It later said that the services have “been restored.”

We are able to confirm that all services impacted by today’s IP outage have been restored. We understand how important these services are to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this outage caused.

— CenturyLink (@CenturyLink) August 30, 2020

In a later statement, the firm told The Verge that the outage was caused after CenturyLink went down.

“Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted many multiple providers,” it said. “This was not a Cloudflare-specific outage. Level 3/CenturyLink was responsible for an outage that affected many Internet services, including Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”

DownDetector, a website that monitor’s Internet outages, showed graphs that suggested websites operated by Starbucks, Garmin, EA, Destiny, Hulu, Zoom, Spectrum, Snapchat, Xbox Live, and Reddit had issues on Sunday.

Cloudflare is designed to prevent direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where networks of computers send traffic to take them offline.

In 2018, CenturyLink experienced a significant outage that affected ATMs, lottery drawings, 911 calls, and more.