For about an hour Internet users faced problems accessing many websites because of a problem with Cloudflare.
The company provides internet security and other services meant to help online businesses operate smoothly.
BBC reports that many members of the public had reported seeing “502 errors” displayed in their browsers when they tried to visit its clients.
The service has more than 16 million customers ranging from the chat service Discord to the dating site OKCupid.
The problem had now been resolved although some of its analytics tools were still facing disruption, Cloudflare said.
Among the casualties was Downdetector, a popular site used to monitor disruption.
Also, CoinDesk a news site specialising in cryptocurrencies was one of those affected. It said that it had received bad data from its providers as a consequence, which resulted in it misreporting prices.
“Calm down everyone, Bitcoin is not $26,” it tweeted before adding that it had now resolved the issue.
The plane-tracking service Flightradar24, social media statistics service Social Blade and vineyard monitoring system Vinelytics were among others to confirm they had been affected.
In the verge for the Network error, a 502 error code signifies that an internet server has received a invalid response from another server it is trying to contact.
Report says that there has been speculation that San Francisco-based Cloudflare had suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in which it had been flooded with traffic.
But it has denied this was the case and has blamed the incident instead on a “bad software” update that had been “rolled back”.
“This was not an attack (as some have speculated) and we are incredibly sorry that this incident occurred,” blogged John Graham-Cumming, the firm’s chief technology officer
“Internal teams are meeting as I write performing a full post-mortem to understand how this occurred and how we prevent this from ever occurring again.”
The Register reported that the firm also experienced issues last week, although that time it appears that the telecoms network Verizon was at fault.
Olalekan Ajimoti – Blogger, Content Writer, and Digital Marketer helping brands and retailers build 8-figure e-commerce since 2016.
As a corporate trainer, brand communications expert, and brand consultant, I help people start, stay and grow in business leveraging digital skills and traditional expertise.
