DDoS protection giant Cloudflare has just come out, paralyzing major corners of the internet. However, blockchain networks like Bitcoin remain resilient.
Blockchain stays online even if Cloudflare goes down
Today, Cloudflare experienced a global network issue that caused major connected services to tardy down or stop working altogether. According to the website status trackerthe company began investigating the issue around noon UTC. Cloudflare noted that it “experienced degradation of internal services.”
Cloudflare offers a range of internet and cybersecurity services, and is best known for its DDoS protection “Browser Check…” page, which has become a familiar sight when browsing some popular websites.
About 20% of the world’s traffic passes through the company, so any problems with it can have wide-ranging effects. Today’s outage clearly demonstrated this as it caused problems for thousands of users around the world.
Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s CTO, posted statement on X:
I won’t mince my words: today we let our customers and the broader Internet down when an issue on the Cloudflare network impacted gigantic amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses and organizations that operate Cloudflare depend on our availability and we apologize for the impact this has caused.
Some of the biggest names affected by this issue included ChatGPT, X, Uber and McDonald’s. Ironically, even Downdetector, a website that helps users track internet outages, itself went down during the event.
It took Cloudflare several hours to resolve the issue. At 14:42 UTC, the state’s website said, “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident has now been resolved.” There were some issues after this patch, but they were resolved by 17:44 UTC, when the website updated: “We are no longer seeing elevated errors or network delays.”
The market initially reacted to the event with Cloudflare’s shares falling to $194, but when the company restored services, the price rose back to $199.
How the firm's price has fluctuated in recent days | Source: NYSE-NET on TradingView
While Cloudflare was dealing with the outage, Binance co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao sent to X: “Blockchain was still working.” The remarks highlighted the fact that even when 20% of the internet had problems, blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum continued to function normally.
Unlike regular networks, which usually have a certain point of centralization, blockchain networks operate in a completely decentralized manner. This means that even if some nodes go offline, there is no impact on the network.
Earlier this year, Amazon’s AWS also experienced a major outage, disrupting much of the Internet. Even then, blockchain networks remained steadfast.
As for the cause of Cloudflare’s latest outage, Knecht said it was a hidden bug in the service related to the company’s bot mitigation capabilities. It started crashing, which led to widespread degradation of Cloudflare services. “It wasn’t an attack,” Knecht explained.
The chief technology officer also said that an investigation report is being prepared with limpid details about what happened during the event.
Bitcoin price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $93,300, down 9.5% over the past week.
The trend in the BTC price over the last five days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured photo by André François McKenzie on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com
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