A significant event happened last night. Many sites and popular services around the Internet and around the world suddenly became inaccessible.
Popular services such as Discord chat, Riot Games and Destiny servers, Patreon platform, Feedly and hundreds of others were affected. Even the DownDetector website was unavailable, which allows you to track failures and outages of various services in real-time.
The American company Cloudflare was to blame for the shutdown of “half of the Internet”. It specializes in providing DNS servers, protecting against DDoS attacks, and providing secure access to resources.
Cloudflare’s structure crashed and all services that rely on the company’s DNS were also “disconnected” from the network. And there were a lot of such services.
The Cloudflare team quickly responded to the situation and reported on the implementation of the “fix”. However, some services continue to work intermittently, regularly throwing an access error.
At the same time, Cloudflare denied rumors that the problem arose as a result of an attack. But because of an error in the configuration of its servers. Note that the system shutdown itself lasted 27 minutes and traffic fell by 50%. But not the entire Cloudflare network was affected, but only some regions. The affected regions include London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Richmond, Newark, Atlanta, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The head of Cloudflare noted that all systems have already been restored and Cloudflare is currently looking for the cause of the failure.
It is worth to mention that in the past few days, a similar problem has arisen on several Facebook iOS SDK-based apps, such as Spotify, Viber, Pinterest, and several other apps. It was not an iOS bug – as many have suggested – but a bug in the Facebook iOS SDK, as the company’s Developers themselves has admitted.
Several services have already rushed to inform their users, such as Viber, through its official Twitter account, stating that they are also trying to solve the problem as soon as possible. At the same time, they note that uninstalling and reinstalling the application is not going to solve it.
The apps that crash integrate the Facebook SDK. The social network confirms: “We are aware and we are investigating an increase in errors on the iOS SDK which causes the crash of certain applications”. Users on Twitter notably mention the case of Spotify, TikTok, Waze, SoundCloud, Call of Duty: Mobile and many others.
For those who do not know, some applications (iOS or Android) integrate the Facebook SDK to access certain social network tools in order to offer them to users. This is particularly the case when an application offers to connect with a Facebook account.