Half the internet died while you were sleeping. Here's what happened.

Don't panic.
By Amanda Yeo  on 
Cloudflare logo of an US internet company is seen on a smartphone screen.
A Cloudflare outage caused widespread chaos, as many websites went down. Credit: Pavlo Gonchar / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

An outage of Cloudflare's servers caused a slew of websites and services to go down today, including big names such as Discord, DoorDash, and League of Legends. The online security company was quick to identify the problem and rectify the issue, getting these service back up and running, but it was a chaotic few minutes there.

It isn't clear exactly what caused the outage, with Cloudflare's official Twitter saying only that the "issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented." According to Cloudflare's incident report, the issue was reported at approximately 6:34 a.m. UTC, the problem identified just over 20 minutes later around 6:57 a.m., and the fix implemented at around 7:20 a.m.

"Connectivity in Cloudflare’s network has been disrupted in broad regions," wrote Cloudflare in the initial report. "Eyeballs attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network."

Affected websites included Crunchyroll, Amazon Web Services, Google Services, NordVPN, Coinbase, Grindr, and Fur Affinity — among many, many more.

Of course, the denizens of Twitter were very quick to tweet about it, reveling in the "dog in the school" energy the entire internet was giving off.

Amanda Yeo
Amanda Yeo
Reporter

Amanda Yeo is Mashable's Australian reporter, covering entertainment, culture, tech, science, and social good. This includes everything from video games and K-pop to movies and gadgets.


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