On Tuesday, a Cloudflare outage hit several popular services on the internet, including social platforms like Discord, Omegle, DoorDash, NordVPN, Feedly, and Crunchyroll.
Per Cloudflare’s investigation, a critical P0 incident was found at around 6.34 AM UTC, due to which the connectivity to the network was disrupted in broad regions. The report added,
“Customers attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network.
We will continue updating you when we have more information.”
Nevertheless, at 6.57 AM UTC, the team identified the issue and implemented a fix. The team announced at 7.20 AM UTC that the fix was implemented, and they were currently monitoring the results. Finally, at 8.06 AM UTC, Cloudflare announced the issue was resolved.
Cryptocurrency Exchanges Offline
As more and more services confirmed being offline, many cryptocurrency exchanges have also taken note of the event and assured customers that their funds were safe. Prominent cryptocurrency exchange BitMex was investigating the possibility at around 6.56 AM UTC,
“We are aware of the BitMEX website and API experiencing intermittent connectivity issues for users in some, but not all, locations.
We believe this is related to an issue with Cloudflare, which has reported “widespread issues” with its services and network [https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/].
These issues do not appear to be limited to BitMEX; other crypto websites also appear to be affected.
Funds are safe; we will share an update shortly.”
Meanwhile, @FTX_Official also informed customers about the problem and difficulty in reaching its website.
Meanwhile, the non-custodial client wallet, XUMM, also brought people’s attention to the problem and assured that Cloudflare was among the trusted public infrastructure, APIs, backends, etc.
As Cloudflare fixed the issue on its end, all the exchanges and applications were still monitoring the situation.
However, Binance was one of the cryptocurrency exchanges that remained unaffected due to the outage. According to the CEO, CZ Binance had a “redundant setup for one of the services many others rely on solely.”
“Welcome to decentralization. We just have a redundant setup for one of the services many others rely on solely. Lucky.”
However, as informed by the CEO, CoinMarketCap did not remain stable and was affected by the outage.
Cloudflare issues
Reportedly, Cloudflare faced an outage just last week and regarded it as a “wide spread” issue, and the CTO, John Graham-Cumming noted at the time on a Hacker News thread that it was not a worldwide outage but “a lot of placed” are impacted.
“Yes, not worldwide but a lot of places. Problem with our backbone. We know what. Rollbacks etc. happening. Bring it back up in chunks.
Should be back up everywhere.”
Looking at this pattern, users have now started discussing a fail-open solution like Binance.