Verizon glitched and took half of the internet with it [Update: It’s fixed now]

Ah, the day the internet died. At least, that’s what it felt like today, waking up to a widespread outage of popular sites and services.

While the initial cause wasn’t known, internet service provider Cloudflare posted that a misconfiguration by a network provider that it runs on was likely the cause.

[Update] Things seem to be working as normal.

It turns out it was two network providers, DQE Communications, a local ISP in Pennsylvania, and Verizon. DQE mistakenly announced 20,000 IP address prefixes, which for some reason, Verizon accepted the mistaken IPs and added them to the routing that makes up our internet.

That then had the knock-on effect of slowing down the rest of the internet. Think of a construction detour making a freeway go onto surface streets, at rush hour, and you’ve got a small sense of the issue.

Cloudflare protects a huge chunk of the modern internet

Cloudflare is a major security provider for the modern web, with over 16 million websites using its services. It also provides Content Delivery Network (CDN) services and other functions of cloud computing. It’s great when it works, some of the web’s biggest DDoS attacks have been mitigated by Cloudflare’s tech.

The thing is, with how many websites or internet providers use Cloudflare, even minor issues get amplified.

• The issue was a “possible route leak impacting some Cloudflare IP ranges”
• Major websites like Reddit, Amazon and even Google were having issues this morning
• Even some internet providers like Spectrum had issues, as well as cloud-managed networking hardware like Plume
• The outage lasted two hours

Even though the worst of the effects are over, there still might be some glitches as you use the internet today. Discord, a popular chat service for gamers, is still having issues currently, as is Slack and its integrations. It’s always Mondays…

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere. His hobbies include photography, animation, and hoarding Reddit gold.