A serious error in the configuration had serious consequences with Cloudflare. The performance of network traffic on the popular cloud service was simply halved. The effects were painful for many websites. For once, the reason for the failure was not a malicious hacker attack.
Customer websites difficult or even impossible to access
In the evening of June 17th, many customers of the Internet service provider Cloudflare suffered the consequences of a configuration error. Many different websites were affected by Cloudflare. The web pages of the customers could be reached within a certain time window only with difficulty or partly not at all. Above all the customers, who live in Europe and North America, were affected by the error. Especially the failure of the popular chat service Discord, caused a lot of displeasure among many people.
Disruption for almost half an hour
As the operator of the cloud service announced, the disruption was resolved within 27 minutes. But until everything was back to the “old” again, a few more minutes passed. Nowadays, such disruptions immediately make one think of a hacker attack. However, there was another cause for this malfunction. Cloudflare said that the malfunction was caused by an internal error. This is said to have been “human error”. During a standard maintenance of the servers it is said to have simply been an error. This overtaxed the router at the Atlanta site and caused a widespread failure in North America and Europe.
Not only Atlanta affected
Large sites in Europe, Brazil and North America were affected by the congestion The problems caused great displeasure among customers. Of course, Cloudflare’s customers will also have had fear of data theft and similar serious consequences. Accordingly, in this case one can probably speak of luck in misfortune. Cloudflare has apologized to all its customers for the circumstances. The company has already reacted with appropriate changes. These are intended to avoid similarly serious mistakes in the future.
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