What’s Cloudflare? Network crash takes Postmates, Discord and other sites down with it

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, Grindr, 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.

Cameron Turner, a Cloudflare spokesperson, told McClatchy News in an email that the outage was not the result of an attack.

“It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available,” Turner said. “We believe we have addressed the root cause and monitoring systems for stability now. We will share more shortly.”

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% of the Fortune 1,000 for more than 1 billion unique IP addresses per day.”

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.”

This story was originally published July 17, 2020 at 6:33 PM with the headline "What’s Cloudflare? Network crash takes Postmates, Discord and other sites down with it."