Cloudflare, " a provider of CDN (Content Delivery Network) services, experienced an outage, making many games and services that use Cloudflare unavailable.
The Cloudflare team is aware of the current service issues and is working to resolve as quickly as possible. Updates can be followed here. https://t.co/22Yiyu3lKJ
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) June 21, 2022
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare has a large market share in services that provide CDN, and is used by major services such as Discord, Shopify, and DeepL.
In gaming, the platform My Nintendo Store and popular titles League of Legends, VALORANT, and Genshin Impact also use Cloudflare and were unable to play games.
It has now been restored & is being monitored.
According to Cloudflare, the outage occurred at 6:43 UTC (15:43 JST) today, and the restoration was completed at 7:20 UTC (16:20 JST).
(Currently monitoring to confirm recovery)
The outage lasted about 40 minutes, but the infrastructure engineers must have been frustrated because they could not log in to the dashboard during that time and could not work to turn off the CDN.
Failures on the CDN rather than on the origin server are frustrating.
In addition to Cloudflare, other typical CDNs include Amazon CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, and Google Cloud CDN, but there is no guarantee that any of them will never fail.
Redundancy would be ideal, but it is difficult to know how much cost and resources to spend on financial services such as banking and securities, and services that are not social infrastructure.
I would like to think that a failure once every few years is acceptable, since the cost incurred by a company will affect the price paid by the consumer.
You can check Cloudflare's outage information at Cloudflare Status, so you can check the status of this outage or, if you are curious, see how often outages have occurred in the past.