How does the Cloudflare incident affect the Internet worldwide and in Vietnam?

On the evening of November 18, Vietnam time, a serious incident occurred on the Internet, causing many famous services such as ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, X and many other platforms to not operate normally.

The main cause was identified as an incident at Cloudflare, one of the leading companies in the field of Internet infrastructure.

In addition to international services, many major websites in Vietnam also encountered similar problems. Users accessing these sites only received error messages from Cloudflare.

Domestic technology forums and communities have recorded that many major electronic newspapers and websites such as Cong Thuong Newspaper, Thoi Bao Ngan Hang, Thuong Truong Magazine, Petrotimes, Tinh Te social network, and the Law Library website have also been disrupted.

Cloudflare operates a global network of servers that store and deliver cached content for websites. (Photo: Reuters)

According to information from the Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC), there are currently no specific statistics on the number of affected websites and the duration of the outage in Vietnam. When accessing high-traffic websites such as Tinhte, taimienphi.vn, thuvienphapluat.vn, users receive an error message "Internal server error" with the error code "Error code 500".

Although the issue has been resolved, its repercussions still linger. Many users have expressed frustration when their work and entertainment tools suddenly stopped working.

The online community also quickly turned to discussing the root cause of the problem, revealing the complex dependence of internet infrastructure on core service providers.

When Cloudflare goes down, websites are immediately exposed and taken offline. It also temporarily disables their security, leaving them vulnerable while the service is down.

A potential bug in the service that powers bot mitigation capabilities caused the problem. (Photo: Techcrunch)

Previously, according to an announcement from Cloudflare, at 7:21 p.m. on November 18 (Vietnam time), the company discovered the problem and began to fix it. After less than 2 hours, Cloudflare announced that the repair was completed and believed the problem had been resolved.

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said a potential bug in the service that powers bot mitigation capabilities caused the issue, following a routine configuration change.

He insisted this was not an attack and admitted that Cloudflare failed to meet customer expectations during this incident.

The incident also affected Elon Musk's X platform, just a month after he boasted about a major outage of AWS (Amazon Web Services), which included encrypted messaging service Signal.

While Elon Musk has previously claimed that messages on X are fully encrypted and do not rely on AWS, it is currently impossible to directly link to his post due to the ongoing issue.

Signal President Meredith Whittaker pointed out the disadvantages of having so much of the internet rely on a few infrastructure services like Cloudflare and AWS. She stressed the need to consider the infrastructure requirements of any social media platform and questioned the lack of choice in this area.

US President Donald Trump's social network Truth Social, Uber car booking service, Paypal online payment... were also among the services that were inaccessible on the evening of November 18.

Phan Hoang

Source: https://vtcnews.vn/su-co-cloudflare-anh-huong-the-nao-den-internet-toan-the-gioi-va-viet-nam-ar988217.html