Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflares 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored.

Early reports suggested Google DNS may also have been affected, but this turned out not to be the case Google Cloud confirmed it had no outages yesterday.

Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented. CEO Matthew Prince explains that it all came down to a bad router in Atlanta:

The company also issued a statement via email emphasizing that this was not an attack on the system.

This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack, the company said in a statement. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and monitoring systems for stability now. We will share more shortlywe have a team writing an update as we speak.

Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify and League of Legends were all affected, giving an idea of the breadth of the issue. Not only were websites down but also some status pages meant to provide warnings and track outages. In at least one case, even the status page for the status page was down.

A DNS, or Domain Name System, is an integral part of the web, connecting domains (like TechCrunch.com) to their IP addresses (such as 152.195.50.33). If the one you or a site use goes down, it doesnt matter whether a websites own servers are working or not users cant even reach them in the first place. Internet providers usually have their own, but theyre often bad, so alternatives like Googles have existed for many years, and Cloudflare launched its service in late 2018.

Cloudflare wrote in a tweet and an update to its own status page (which thankfully remained available) that it was investigating issues with Cloudflare Resolver and our edge network in certain locations. Customers using Cloudflare services in certain regions are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed.

Despite much speculation as to the cause of the outage, there is no evidence that it was caused by a denial-of-service attack or any other form of malicious hackery.

(This story has been updated to reflect new information, such as the Google and Cloudflare statements.)

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Cloudflare DNS goes down, taking a large piece of the internet with it - TechCrunch