Submission + - CloudFlare's Edge Routers go down taking 785,000 sites with them (techcrunch.com)
_0x783czar writes: "At close to 10:00 UTC today, CloudFlare ("a content delivery network and distributed domain name server service marketed as improving website performance and speed and providing security.") pushed an update which caused the edge routers in their network to crash. This outage in turn brought down all 785,000 websites which use CloudFlare's service, for nearly an hour. Sites including Wikileaks, 4Chan, and Imgur were among those directly affected.
Co-founder and CEO: Matthew Prince, hinted to TechCruch that the issue was caused by a flaw in the routers—which had to be compensated for by manually rebooting each one across the world. None of the servers were directly affected in any way, but each was rendered unreachable by the network outage. “This is a completely unacceptable event to us,” Prince said. “In our four years of life, this is our third significant outage.”
"CloudFlare generates so many pageviews that it would be the tenth website in the world." And as such this outage affected a significant portion of the internet, calling into question what if any significant backlash the company may face from its customers and the internet in general. Do the benefits of using such a service out weigh the risks, or do many sites even have a viable alternative?"
Co-founder and CEO: Matthew Prince, hinted to TechCruch that the issue was caused by a flaw in the routers—which had to be compensated for by manually rebooting each one across the world. None of the servers were directly affected in any way, but each was rendered unreachable by the network outage. “This is a completely unacceptable event to us,” Prince said. “In our four years of life, this is our third significant outage.”
"CloudFlare generates so many pageviews that it would be the tenth website in the world." And as such this outage affected a significant portion of the internet, calling into question what if any significant backlash the company may face from its customers and the internet in general. Do the benefits of using such a service out weigh the risks, or do many sites even have a viable alternative?"
