Outage Hits Discord, Large Swath of the Web Due to Error At Cloudflare
Access to Discord, Riot Games, and numerous other websites briefly went down on Friday due to an error at web infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
The outage began around 5:15 pm EST when attempts to connect to the affected web properties failed to reach the correct IP addresses. Browsers showed the error involved the domain name system (DNS), which acts as the phone book for the internet.
Cloudflare, which serves 26 million sites and speeds up access to web content, is indicating the problem had something to do with the company’s DNS resolver, which helps ferry website lookups to the correct IP address.
‘It was not as a result of an attack,” Cloudflare said. “It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available.”
The outage affected 12 different Cloudflare data centers. However, the company has identified the problem and is currently implementing a fix.
Discord added that the outage appeared to be an “upstream internet issue.” “We’ve got all engineers on deck investigating the issue,” the popular gaming chat platform said in a tweet.
PCMag was among the websites that briefly went down, which also included FBI.gov, Mashable.com and even Downdetector.com, a real-time outage monitoring website. But at about 5:38 pm EST the sites appeared to all go back up.
Nevertheless, Cloudflare is warning that customers in certain regions may still face some connection errors as it tries to fully patch the problem. The company has a dedicated webpage that’ll provide updates on the situation.
