Outage At Website Security Company Take Out Nearly Half The World’s Internet

Many of the largest websites on the internet stopped working after one of the tech companies designed to secure the web suddenly began experiencing massive outages.

Chat service discord, cryptocurrency websites and several other prominent domains reported problems Tuesday morning with their services after Cloudflare reported outages. Websites used for checking whether other services are online were also knocked out, leaving people without any easy way of checking which services were affected.

“Aware of major Cloudflare issues impacting us network-wide,” Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince said on Twitter. “Team is working on getting to the bottom of what’s going on. Will continue to update.”

Cloudflare, founded in 2009, provides services that help companies’ websites get online and be accessible to their users.

Cloudflare has a good record of securing website domains. The company successfully mitigated the largest-ever recorded denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in February 2014 against an undisclosed customer. Cloudflare reported in November of that year another massive DDoS attack with independent media sites being targeted.

The outage appears to have temporarily dinged half of the internet, with people across the globe experiencing 502 errors. The company’s System Status page, which collects and reports incidents on the worldwide web, lists most of the largest cities in the world as being affected. The company said on its website that it has resolved the issue.