Update 7:15 pm: In a blog post Tuesday night, CloudFlyer CEO Matthew Prince provided more details about today’s outage, which he says is CloudFlyer’s worst since 2019. While the company initially suspected they were being subjected to a DDoS attack, Prince says “this was not directly or indirectly the result of a single cyber attack or malicious activity.”
Instead, a change in one of the company’s database systems caused the database to outsource a number of entries to the ‘feature file’ used by our bot management system, Prince writes. “This feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger than expected feature file was then spread across all the machines that make up our network.
“The software running on these machines that route traffic in our network reads this feature file to keep our bot management system up to date with the latest threats,” Prince adds. “The software had a feature file size limit that was less than twice its size. This caused the software to fail.”
Among his changes is to “enable more global kill switches for features” from CloudFlyer moving forward, he says. For those who want more technical details, the blog breaks it down.
Update 3:30 p.m.: CloudFlyer CTO Dan Nacht says the company “resolved the traffic impact moving through our network” around 9:30 a.m. However, “this incident required some additional work to fully restore our control plane (our dashboard and APIs that our customers use to configure CloudFlyer), (which) should now be fully available.”
CloudFlyer is “monitoring these services and continuing to make sure everything is up and running. Again, we plan to share a full walkthrough of what went wrong today in a couple of hours and we plan to make sure it never happens again.”
Update 11:25 AM: CloudFlyer’s CTO is blaming “a latent bug in the service reducing our bot mitigation capability” for today’s outage. He added that “we started experiencing crashes after a routine configuration change,” which “caused widespread degradation of our network and other services.”
Dan Nacht stressed that this was “not an attack”, and “work is ongoing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He promised to share more details in a few hours.
He added, “I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the wider internet when an issue in the @cloudfuller network affected massive amounts of traffic that we rely on.” “Sites, businesses and organizations that rely on CloudFlyer depend on our availability and I apologize for the impact.”
Down Detector says it has logged 2.1+ million reports of connectivity issues globally today, of which 453K+ came from the US.
Update at 9:50 am: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” CloudFlyer said.
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Update 9 pm: CloudFlyer says a “fix is ​​being implemented” for the issue that caused the outage. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to make sure,” he said at 8:10 a.m.
Still, as more and more people wake up and try to sign on different platforms, reports of down detectors have increased significantly. Users are experiencing issues on Canva, ChatGupt, Cloud, Durdish, Grindr, Indeed, Truth Social, Uber, X, Zoom, and more. It has not been confirmed that all of these cases are related to CloudFlyer, but it is likely, as many of the reports are around 8:30 a.m. EST.
“We are continuing (to work) on restoring services for users of the Application Services,” CloudFlyer said at 8:59 a.m. EST.
Original story:
Struggling to access websites or apps? This could be due to the outage of CloudFlyer services, which is affecting third-party tools like ChatGPT and X.
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As reported by users on Down Detector, CloudFlyer first experienced problems on Tuesday, November 18 at 6:15 a.m. EST. The brand acknowledged the issues, saying, “CloudFlyer is aware of, and is investigating, this issue that is affecting multiple customers.”
Many websites have 500 wide errors. So far, outages have been confirmed for social media network X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and movie review platform Letterboxed.
On its status website, Openei said, “We have confirmed that this incident is due to an issue with one of our third-party service providers. We will provide an update as soon as it becomes available.” There are also issues with its APIs and video generation platform Sora.
At 7:20 a.m., CloudFlyer announced that it was beginning to see service recovery, although it noted, “Customers may continue to experience higher error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” The brand has since said it is “continuing to investigate the issue.”
Last month, a major Amazon Web Services outage saw more than 2,000 websites and apps take offline for hours. The brand later confirmed that the issues stemmed from a “latent defect” in its largest cluster of data centers, known as US-EAST-1.
Spotify’s mobile app is still experiencing issues today, with some users finding that playing podcasts causes both the Android and iOS apps to crash.
Disclosure: Down detector owner Okla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.
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