Today, around noon, Cloudflare servers faced a global outrage causing many issues around the world, including Riot’s IP Valorant and LoL having connection issues along with the popular VoIP and messaging platform Discord.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company that acts as a mediator between the end-user (i.e., us) and the servers.
Cloudflare’s services also provide a content delivery network, which helps to provide seamless availability of applications content to the internet. Most IPs use Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation, ensuring safety from a potential DDoS attack.
Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator floods the servers with requests and tries to overwhelm them to shut them down.
If you don’t know, each server is just like any other computer system, and when the number of requests received reaches beyond its capability, the system may crash, thus disrupting the service.
This is where a DDoS mitigation service comes into the picture. DDoS mitigation is a filter between the internet and the application server, ensuring that the requests reaching the application are legit and not part of a DDoS attack.
The DDoS mitigation uses various techniques to separate genuine human requests from a system or an attacker.
Cloudflare is one such provider of DDoS mitigation and provides the same to various application servers.
Amongst various IPs are Valorant, Discord, League of legend, etc., both employing Cloudflare’s services. At 06:43 AM GMT, when Cloudflare services were disrupted, people worldwide reported issues with their respective applications.
The issue occurred because Cloudflare services were disrupted, thus disrupting the flow of traffic from the internet to the application servers.
Cloudflare has since identified the issue and fixed it by 07:20 AM GMT and reported that they successfully resolved it at 08:06 AM GMT. You can read the whole thread about the issue here.
The disruption has caused an uproar since many companies like Discord, Riot, AWS, Steam, 2KGames, etc., use Cloudflare services. All the services should be back to normal now, as Cloudflare has reported that the issue is resolved.
