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Reddit, X and Zoom were down — Cloudflare maintainence looks to have caused it
Users were having a hard time doing much of anything on the internet
We're calling it!
And with a confirmation of a fix being implemented by Cloudflare and all the service outage reports for X, Zoom, Reddit and more dropping all the way back down, we're calling it.
My guess is it could've been a bit of a kettling scenario. The routine maintenance caused some latency issues, that caused more people to refresh more regularly/check the pages. An increase in traffic to an already re-routed datacenter causes more pressure on the re-routed server and here we are.
And there goes Zoom
Had a nice Zoom call with my family who are on vacation at the moment to test it — can confirm it's working and outage reports are dropping off too!
X outage reports are dropping like a stone
Hope you enjoyed your time away from X — the feed is loading for me and outage reports on Down Detector are going down sharply!
Cloudflare's on the case
We've been thinking these outages could be tied back to some scheduled maintenance of Cloudflare's datacenter in Newark. The company's just updated its system status saying they are "investigating increased error rates and latency in multiple services."
With all of these services taking a dip, looks like they may have resolved it already. But we'll test it ourselves!
Reddit declining
The reports for Reddit are starting to drop (X is still climbing), but it could mean that some of the traffic is being rerouted to other servers successfully (if that is ultimately what's causing the problems).
That's a lot of X reports
Currently, X has around 33,000 reports on Downdetector, which is a shockingly high number.
It's not surprising that X would have the most reports, though, as it's the most popular service among those dealing with issues at the moment.
Reddit still showing all systems operational
Something seems to be happening on the backend that's causing problems for Reddit, which started this whole ordeal, but the company hasn't acknowledged it yet. The company's status page still shows "All Systems Operational," despite thousands of Downdetector reports suggesting otherwise.
Part of something larger?
While Reddit was the first major service to see a large Downdetector spike, we also noticed several services jumping, including Teams, Whatnot, Crunchyroll, Toast and tons of others.
We're also seeing spikes in reports to Cloudflare and AWS, two services that are the backbone of much of the internet. We've looked into AWS and found it to be a false flag at this point. Cloudflare's status page shows it's performing maintenance at its EWR (Newark) data center.
"Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region. For PNI / CNI customers connecting with us in this location, please make sure you are expecting this traffic to fail over elsewhere during this maintenance window as network interfaces in this datacentre may become temporarily unavailable."
This could certainly explain why services like Reddit are having issues.
Reports are coming in fast
We're seeing around 2,200 reports on Reddit at the moment, which is a large number in a very short time. It's too early to say if this outage will last, but it definitely seems that large quantities of Reddit users are having problems.
