Websites Crash Worldwide as Cloudflare Suffers Outage

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Cloudflare, a web infrastructure provider and content delivery network, is reportedly suffering outages resulting in major websites crashing across the internet.

Multiple websites crashed worldwide today as one of the web’s most important infrastructure providers and content delivery networks, Cloudflare, suffered an outage. Cloudflare provides DNS and CDN services and powers approximately “40% of the internet.”

The Cloudflare system status page stated that “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” The issue is reportedly related to the Cloudflare Resolver in the company’s edge network in certain locations. The outage struck at quite a few Cloudflare data centers at the same time.

Downdetector lists a number of sites and services being unavailable including Discord, Spectrum Internet, Shopify, AT&T, and Amazon Web Services. Some security researchers are alleging that the issue is not just affecting Cloudflare but many other smaller service providers.

The term DDOS began to trend across Twitter as sites went down, referring to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack. Cloudflare defines a DDOS attack as “a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.”

Kaspersky Lab, a multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider based in Moscow, Russia, displayed an unusual amount of botnet activity on its Cybermap, which keeps track of data traveling around the globe. The data appeared to originate in China and was being received in the United States.

Breitbart News will update readers as more information is available.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

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