If you couldn’t access your cryptocurrency exchange today, you most definitely weren’t alone since millions of websites have been recently affected by a major Cloudflare glitch. The leading internet security provider fixed the issue in about an hour.
502 errors take over the planet
From dating sites in the likes of OKCupid to cryptocurrency exchanges – all of these websites started showing “502 errors,” and it seemed like the Earth stopped spinning for a while.
Even Downdetector, the website whose sole purpose is to determine whether a certain website is down or not, was inaccessible due to the Cloudflare outrage.
DownDetector is unable to tell if cloudflare is down because cloudflare is down. 🙃 pic.twitter.com/pBSgv9QISc
— Tarjei Husøy (@t_husoy) July 2, 2019
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, while commenting on the matter, claimed that they couldn’t figure out the cause of this problem since it’s something they had never dealt with before.
“That is a failure scenario that we hadn’t ever seen before, it took us a while to figure out what the cause was, there was a runaway process that looked like it was causing the issue.”
Bitcoin price plunges to $23
Cryptocurrency-related websites didn’t stay above the fray with major exchanges in the likes of Coinbase and Bitfinex experiencing unexpected downtime, which obviously didn’t sit well with their users.
Cloudflare is going to take a lot of heat today. All of the websites that use Cloudflare are all down and giving 502 errors.
Coinbase got hit, terrible timing. @Cloudflare #cloudflare pic.twitter.com/VSvQPdWxNm
— Johnny (@DR6am) July 2, 2019 CoinMarketCap, the leading cryptocurrency ranking website, also went down while Bitcoin is experiencing huge price swings.
Being unable to get accurate data from its providers, CoinDesk even showed the Bitcoin price at $26 (now that’s a buying opportunity!).
ALERT: Due to a cloudflare outage, we're getting bad data from our providers, which is showing incorrect crypto prices. Calm down everyone, Bitcoin is not $26.
— CoinDesk (@coindesk) July 2, 2019
All these websites are currently working just fine since the issue has been fixed, but can we really rely on centralized services in the likes of Cloudflare?
