VOZ, Tinhte.vn frozen because Cloudflare crashed

Many major websites in Vietnam have reported inaccessibility errors.

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,... were also inaccessible, causing interruption of 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".

A number of popular websites in Vietnam were frozen due to a Cloudflare error.

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 continue", which is an error message on OpenAI's application, was searched by many people.

The incident sparked a wave of comments on social media platforms, with many users expressing frustration at the sudden "freezing" of work and entertainment tools. However, the online community's reaction quickly turned to discussion of the root cause.

The reason may stem from the fact that many news sites, portals and community forums regularly use Cloudflare services to optimize loading speeds and protect against cyber attacks. This partly exposes the complex dependence of the Internet infrastructure on core service providers, which operate silently but hold the lifeblood of the online network.

When the Cloudflare “shield” fails, these websites are immediately exposed and shut down. This makes it impossible for users to access content, while the entire security layer is also temporarily disabled, leaving the websites exposed to security risks during the service interruption.

Cloudflare, a company that provides content delivery networks (CDNs) and DDoS protection tools, quickly posted a statement confirming the issue. The severity of the technical issue was evident when even the website Down Detector was affected.

Source: https://znews.vn/voz-tinhtevn-dong-bang-vi-cloudflare-sap-post1603939.html