The company that just froze part of the global internet

On the evening of November 18, part of the global Internet stopped working due to a technical problem at Cloudflare.

The outage shows that the Internet infrastructure services that operate in the background, out of the user's sight, are vital. One failure can bring down a series of seemingly unrelated websites.

The world's largest server service provider

Cloudflare is the world's largest CDN provider, with about 34% market share. A CDN is a system of servers located around the world that stores copies of static content on websites.

On websites that use CDN, users when accessing the website will actually access it through the nearest CDN server, thanks to which the website loading speed will be faster.

Cloudflare is the world's largest CDN provider, with about 34% market share. Photo: Contabo.

In addition, CDN systems are also equipped with optimal filters to block abnormal traffic, for example DDoS attacks.

Mr. Hong Phuc, a security expert living in Ho Chi Minh City, likened CDN to an insurance company for websites, so when the CDN provider itself has a problem, the websites are also heavily affected. This $70 billion cybersecurity company plays an extremely important role in the modern Internet, helping to solve core website problems.

In addition to providing a CDN, Cloudflare also acts as a firewall, helping to filter unusual traffic and block cyber attacks, especially distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

In addition, this service also helps hide the IP address of the original server, minimizing the risk of direct attacks.

Another Cloudflare service that is also used by many large websites is a fast and secure intermediate DNS, which helps resolve domain names (convert domain names into IP addresses) effectively, contributing to improving online application performance.

For example, if a user in Spain tries to access a website hosted in the US, Cloudflare's service will connect to a local server in Europe that stores a cached copy of the content. This not only speeds up the connection, but also reduces the load on the main server.

The cybersecurity company describes itself as "one of the largest networks in the world", with "millions of internet assets".

“Today, businesses, nonprofits, bloggers, and anyone with an internet presence can boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare,” reads the Cloudflare homepage.

Domino effect

Websites that use Cloudflare's services include Microsoft, GitHub, Shopify, Mozilla, BuzzFeed, Feedly, Dropbox, and Pinterest.

Popular website in Vietnam is frozen due to Cloudflare error.

Many companies rely entirely on Cloudflare's infrastructure to operate efficiently. If the service goes down, websites will lose the ability to deliver content effectively.

Without Cloudflare, websites must rely entirely on their origin servers, which can lead to severe overloads due to sudden spikes in direct traffic.

This is exactly what happened when the platform suffered its latest problem. On the evening of November 18 (Vietnam time), Cloudflare's technical problem caused many online services, from international to domestic, to stop working simultaneously.

Among them, a series of websites with high traffic in Vietnam such as voz, tinhte, taimienphi.vn, thuvienphapluat.vn,... are also inaccessible, causing interruption in usage needs.

Even the 5th most visited website in Vietnam, which is a pirated comic book site, was also down in the recent incident. Currently, the above sites are still not able to operate again.

Many users in Vietnam were quickly confused when they saw a sudden drop in network speed or websites displaying a generic error message saying " internal server error on Cloudflare's network".

The error message is generic "internal server error on Cloudflare's network".

Many international services popular with Vietnamese people such as ChatGPT and Canva were also completely frozen for many hours. The phrase "please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed", which is an error message on OpenAI's application, was searched by many people.

"Cloudflare is aware of an issue and is investigating it, which potentially affects multiple customers. Details will be provided as more information becomes available," the platform said.

Notably, this is not the first time the global internet has frozen due to Cloudflare. In 2019, Cloudflare's system was interrupted for about 30 minutes.

The cause of this incident was determined to be a software error. Although the problem only lasted for 30 minutes, Cloudflare's problem affected thousands of websites using the company's services.

Source: https://znews.vn/cong-ty-vua-khien-mot-phan-internet-toan-cau-dong-bang-post1603944.html