I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

A chunk of the internet vanished today. Lucky it's not used for anything important, right?

Updated Cloudflare, the outfit noted for the slogan "helping build a better internet", had another wobble today as "network performance issues" rendered websites around the globe inaccessible.

The US tech biz updated its status page at 1352 UTC to indicate that it was aware of issues, but things began tottering quite a bit earlier. Since Cloudflare handles services used by a good portion of the world's websites, such as El Reg, including content delivery, DNS and DDoS protection, when it sneezes, a chunk of the internet has to go and have a bit of a lie down. That means netizens were unable to access many top sites globally.

A stumble last week was attributed to the antics of Verizon by CTO John Graham-Cumming. As for today's shenanigans? We contacted the company, but they've yet to give us an explanation.

While Cloudflare implemented a fix by 1415 UTC and declared things resolved by 1457 UTC, a good portion of internet users noticed things had gone very south for many, many sites.

The company's CEO took to Twitter to proffer an explanation for why things had fallen over, fingering a colossal spike in CPU usage as the cause while gently nudging the more wild conspiracy theories away from the whole DDoS thing.

Massive spike in CPU usage caused primary and backup systems to fall over. Impacted all services. No evidence yet attack related. Shut down service responsible for CPU spike and traffic back to normal levels. Digging in to root cause.

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 2, 2019

However, the outage was a salutary reminder of the fragility of the internet as even Firefox fans found their beloved browser unable to resolve URLs.

Cloudflare is down so Firefox browser users might have a problem resolving some sites. It’s called privacy vs performance trade-off, and today it hits all users at the same time. https://t.co/lrc3ZxvzTc

— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) July 2, 2019

Ever keen to share in the ups and downs of life, even Cloudflare's site also reported the dread 502 error.

So what happens when @Cloudflare is down? 😬 @CloudflareHelp pic.twitter.com/YLdHNZ0Tdg

— Tom Sterritt (@tomsterritt) July 2, 2019

As with the last incident, users who endured the less-than-an-hour of disconnection would do well to remember that the internet is a brittle thing. And Cloudflare would do well to remember that its customers will be pondering if maybe they depend on its services just a little too much.

Updated to add at 1702 BST

Following publication of this article, Cloudflare released a blog post stating the "CPU spike was caused by a bad software deploy that was rolled back. Once rolled back the service returned to normal operation and all domains using Cloudflare returned to normal traffic levels."

Naturally it then added....

"We are incredibly sorry that this incident occurred. 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." ®