UPDATE,3:31 PM: The Internet is actually not under siege and you can still watch Netflix over the weekend, it turns out – though it certainly felt like the digital world had collapsed to PONG levels for a while today.
There are still some dark spots out there, and some sites proving a little rickety, but one of the main providers of the routes that connects domains to their actual IP addresses says they have identified the problem and are watching out for more problems.
“This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack,” said Cloudflare DNS on their blog just a few minutes ago after over an hour of interruption earlier Friday. “It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are monitoring systems for stability now.”
Cloudflare DNS goes down, taking a large piece of the internet with it
Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected.
Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” CEO Matthew Prince explains that it all came down to a bad router in Atlanta:
We had an issue that impacted some portions of the @Cloudflare network. It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone. 1/2
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 17, 2020