Internet is down (again).
A wide range of websites (including our own gizmodo.com) were down on Tuesday morning due to an outage involving internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
According to DownDetector, other websites affected by the outage were Even DownDetector’s own website was briefly affected by the outage.
“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted,” Cloudflare said in a status update shortly before 7 a.m. ET.
At 8:09 ET, the company shared that the issue “has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” but the fix was somewhat patchy. According to Cloudflare, dashboard services were restored at 9:34 pm ET.
Cloudflare told Gizmodo that before the first status update was released, they noticed an “abnormal increase in traffic” to one of their services. The company doesn’t yet know what caused the spike, but they do know that it caused errors in the traffic passing through their network.
“We look forward to ensuring that all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual increase in traffic,” Cloudflare said in a statement.
Cloudflare provides infrastructure and security for many websites around the world. One of the company’s main areas of service is protecting websites against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which occurs when multiple bad actors overload a website or network with traffic requests to degrade performance or cut off access. Earlier this year, the company said it had stopped the largest DDoS attack ever.
Tuesday morning’s outage comes less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage that left sites like WhatsApp, Venmo, Coinbase offline for more than two hours. The disruption caused minor disruption at airports and affected online banking. In an assessment following the outage, AWS shared that the root cause was a bug that failed to be automatically fixed.
Just a week after the AWS incident, the Internet suffered another outage, this time from Microsoft Azure. The Azure issue for the most part affected the company’s services like Xbox.