Web security service Cloudflare sends DOZENS of websites & online games down after ‘third-party transit provider incident’

Cloudflare, a popular service designed to provide security and keep websites online, has run into technical problems, sending down multiple websites and spoiling the weekend for online gamers.

Widespread internet outages were reported across both the United States and Europe on Sunday.

Services such as the Discord chat, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network gaming platforms, the video-on-demand Hulu network and others have been affected by the connectivity problems.

Many popular MMO games (that’s ‘massively multiplayer online’, for those not in the know) experienced outages too, with gamers taking to Twitter to express their anger about the outage.

The issue turned out to be primarily related to Cloudflare, a service providing online security and protecting websites from malicious distributed denial-of-service attacks. The company blamed the outage internet provider CenturyLink for taking down Cloudflare and thereby its customers.

“Today, we saw a widespread internet outage online that impacted multiple providers,” Cloudflare’s spokeswoman Laurel Toney said. “Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”

It’s the second major outage Cloudflare has experienced in recent weeks. In mid-July, the company experienced a fatal router error that brought down not only its own operations, but a large chunk of the internet.

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