On Tuesday evening, around 5 PM, 7.5 million websites like X, ChatGPT, and Canva suddenly went down. The reason Cloudflare being down. What is Cloudflare, how does it work, why did it go down, and should users be concerned? In this Bhaskar Explainer, we will find answers to these 5 important questions… Question-1: What is Cloudflare and how does it work? Answer: The internet is like an open road where anyone can walk. Good people and people with bad intentions. To prevent bad traffic from reaching a website with malicious intent, the most widely used product is Cloudflare. It helps make websites faster, safer, and more reliable. Websites use its services. Cloudflare stands right in front of the website. Like a security checkpoint on the road. It checks every request coming to the website. If there’s any anomaly, it stops it before it reaches the website. If general information is needed, it answers those questions itself. So that traffic doesn’t go directly to the actual website and the website isn’t overloaded. Question-2: What is Cloudflare’s role in 7.5 million websites worldwide going down? Answer: For millions of websites, Cloudflare acts like a security gate. If this gate closes or malfunctions, no traffic can pass through. All traffic either stops or is rejected. Exactly this is happening during the current outage. Cloudflare’s checkpoint is closed, which is why many websites are not working. Question-3: Why does Cloudflare go down, why did the current outage occur? Answer: Reasons for a large CDN company like Cloudflare’s entire network or a large part of it going down are usually very rare. Still, these are 5 major possibilities… Cloudflare has only stated so far regarding today’s outage that there is an issue with “application services” and they are working to fix it. Most indications are that this was due to a configuration change going wrong. The June 2024 outage was also similar. Question-4: Could this also be a cyber attack? Answer: In 99% of cases, a major Cloudflare outage is due to an ‘internal error’; an external attack or physical damage is very rarely the cause. Currently, this does not appear to be a cyber attack. Users do not need to worry. Question-5: What happens next? Answer: Cloudflare said it is aware of the issue and is investigating it. We are working to understand the full impact of this issue and mitigate it. More updates will be provided soon. Their official website, https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/, states that we are continuously working to restore service for Application Services customers. Everything will be back to normal soon.
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