Widespread internet outage

[Jim McCormick]

Hello Mivites,

Currently there is a world wide internet outage that appears to have originated with a company called CenturyLink. They are one of the largest global internet providers and their network issue is affecting a good portion of the internet as a whole, including Cloudflare. We've seen a large drop in traffic to our network but have confirmed nearly every major internet service provider is also having outage reports at https://downdetector.com/ The sharp spike on each service being reported as down began around 6am EST. We have circuits to CenturyLink but turned them off around 6:10am, so we are no longer directly affected by their outage, but given how many network providers use their services, world wide traffic is still being disrupted as a result.

We're also monitoring https://www.cloudflarestatus.com as Cloudflare has reported issues with a 'transit provider', which is CenturyLink. They're a good barometer for overall internet health as some estimates are that a quarter of all websites' traffic flows through Cloudflare.

[lesliekirk]

Thanks for posting the update Jim, much appreciated.

[Jim McCormick]

Follow up:

At approximately 6am EST a global outage occurred on the network of CenturyLink. CenturyLink operates a very large portion of the data circuits that make up the world's global networks, and due to their size, when they have outages it can affect large parts of the internet. The outage not only prevented normal traffic from being carried across their network, it included software misconifguration that caused them to continue accepting traffic for destinations they could not deliver it to. Traffic to Miva's networks were impacted by this issue due to how many internet providers receive service through CenturyLink. Traffic to nearly every major internet service was impacted in the same manner (as seen on downdetector.com). This issue also affected Cloudflare, who handles more than 25% of internet web traffic (see cloudflarestatus.com), so sites utilizing Cloudflare also experienced issues.

As of 11am EST, CenturyLink appears to have the problem nearing resolution. They have made no official statement yet so we do not have more detail at this time.