Web security service CloudFlare was offline for about an hour this
morning due to a system-wide failure of its edge routers.
The
outage, which began around 1:47 a.m. PT, removed the security layer
for 785,000 Web sites, including 4chan and Wikileaks, according
to TechCrunch.
CloudFlare said the outage occurred while it was trying to defend one
of its customers from a distributed denial-of-service attack.
The
outage affected Juniper routers running the Flowspec protocol, which
allows customers to broadcast router rules to a large number of
routers efficiently. CloudFlare uses the protocol to update the rules
on routers to battle attacks and shift traffic.
CloudFlare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said in a company
blog post today
that it detected a DNS attack this morning when it identified attack
packets between 99,971 and 99,985 bytes long, much larger than the
500-byte average and CloudFlare's 4,470-byte maximum packet size.
While
CloudFlare service was restored about an hour later, Prince said
company is examining the cause of the failure and has contactedJuniper to learn whether this is a known bug. Prince also said
customers would receive service credits.
Prince
noted striking similarities between its outage and last year's
Internet
blackout in Syria.
"In
CloudFlare's case the cause was not intentional or malicious, but the
net effect was the same: a router change caused a network to go
offline," Prince wrote.
Source:
Cnet
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