Cloudflare outage takes down X, ChatGPT and SwissForum

Tech, TV, Mobile, Internet and Geek Corner
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The Beeb missed out the outage of our very own SF :grimacing:

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The funny thing was that downdetector.com was itself down :smiley:

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A little meta, but you can check if downdetector is down.

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I’m naturally curious. What is cloudflare? And why does the SFUK need it?

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Security - anti-spamming etc.

Even the FBI use it.

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Oh that makes me feel more secure.

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Cloudflare has become essential internet plumbing. Many sites rely on their services. They do a variety of stuff include blocking certain spam and bots, caching data to make websites faster as well as offer a host of other services.

SF relies on it for DNS, SSL security certificates as well as proxying.

Even though the SF servers were working, the connection between users is via cloudflare and so was interrupted. Even accessing Clouldflare to re-route the traffic was difficult as their admin panel relied on other services which broke down.

There was a workaround to get it working, but it also meant having to get certificates re-issued etc. and so it was easier to wait it out. I took the opportunity to do some server maintenance while Cloudflare was down.

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And it took Thunderbird down.

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Thanks Phil, for the explanation and for looking after us!

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The “Web” is becoming sentient and flexing its muscles.

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So not the Russians or Chinese :face_exhaling:

Cloudflare said the “significant outage” occurred after a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic did not work as intended and “triggered a crash” in its software handling traffic for its wider services.

“We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today,” it said in a statement.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the company added.

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Only because the default DNS server is cloudfare. There are alternatives like Quad9

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Most of been the Green party. It also took down Park and pray. Couldn’t park the car yesterday.

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alternative for who? I have no choice over the default server?

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The post-mortem is published here:

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I just remembered that 12 day ago my employer’s IT department was flagging SwissForum use of cloudflare as a potential risk (blocked by software). For some reason, it was blocked in Firefox but worked with MS Edge. One day later, issues gone. Only a coincidence?

Anyway, some news from 2023. Someone may be reading our rants :slight_smile: