Dozens of websites and mobile applications became unavailable Sunday morning after American web-infrastructure company Cloudflare Inc. experienced issues with its internet service provider. During the outage apps, networks and websites such as Feedly, Discord, Patreon, Deliveroo, League of Legends, the PlayStation Network, Hulu, and Xbox Live were unavailable for more than a half-hour.
Following a barrage of complaints online Cloudflare posted a tweet saying it had identified the problem and was working to immediately fix it. In its post Cloudflare explained that the network issue was caused by a service disruption with a third-party "transit provider" - or internet service provider.
The disruption caused a widespread internet outage that affected multiple providers, company chief technical officer John Graham-Cumming said in a statement. He said Cloudflare's systems immediately detected the problem and rerouted some services to get them back online. However, some manual interventions had to be made as they couldn't accommodate all of their clients.
In a separate statement Graham-Cumming blamed CenturyLink Inc. for the outage saying the disruptions in its service took Cloudflare and its customers down with them. At around noon Sunday, CenturyLink confirmed it was experiencing a significant internet protocol outage caused by issues within its content delivery networks.
Within less than an hour the Louisiana-based telecommunications company said it had fixed the issue and that all of its services had been restored. The company pinpointed the problem to one of its data centers located in Mississauga, a city near Ontario, Canada.
Apart from affecting Cloudflare's operations, the misconfiguration in one of CenturyLink's data centers also affected other internet service providers across the country. This caused some connectivity problems for hundreds of companies across the U.S.
According to Cloudflare, the "outward-propagating" issue that caused problems throughout the nation had led to a 3.5 percent drop in international internet traffic. Most of the issues were limited to the U.S. and Europe. However, based on the number of services that were affected the outage is considered one of the largest ever.
