A Cloudflare outage broke large swathes of the internet

Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday morning, according to its status page. Cloudflare’s technology powers numerous other sites and services across the internet, and the outage seemed to impact a range of different sites, including Discord, Shopify, Grindr, Fitbit, and Peleton, according to Downdetector. Reports of issues started at around 2:30AM ET. Cloudflare reported that it resolved the issue at 4:06AM ET.

The issues were most problematic for users of Cloudflare’s own DNS lookup service. Multiple Verge staff members found they were unable to access any websites at all during the outage as a result of using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. Thankfully, the fix here is simple: change your DNS configuration. I found that simply switching back to using my ISP’s default DNS settings resolved most of my issues.

Cloudflare has experienced similar issues in the past such as in July and August 2020. It’s not a good look for a company that advertises its services as a way to reduce downtime.

Update June 21st, 4:36AM ET: Updated with Cloudflare’s confirmation that the issues have been resolved.