On Tuesday, several websites worldwide such as Zerodha, Upstox, DoorDash, Canva, Discord, among others crashed for some time, with users getting a “500 Internal Server Error" message on their screens.
Many took to social media to report the disruption and after a brief, they were able to use the websites. This was due to an issue with the content delivery network Cloudflare that powers several popular websites.
The outage was acknowledged and resolved by Cloudflare shortly.
However, among those who were most affected were the users of online brokerage firms such as Zerodha and Upstox as they struggled to place orders.
Zerodha advised its users to switch to a different ISP, saying a different route may work.
“Our CDN partner, Cloudflare, is currently experiencing issues in India, due to which some of our services may be temporarily inaccessible,” Upstox said.
Here is all you need to know about what caused the websites to crash on Tuesday:
What happened to the websites on Tuesday?
Cloudflare, the web performance and security company, experienced a widespread outage on Tuesday, impacting multiple sites across the web.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) and server provider, so if any of its systems crash or have issues, the majority of the internet becomes unavailable to the end-user. The issue impacted people across the globe, including India.
The websites that use Cloudflare services started getting a “500 internal server error." This turned out to be an issue with the content deliver system (CDN) facing a critical issue, Cloudflare said
The company said that the incident affected all the data plan services in its network, resulting in the “500 internal server error" across websites.
It added the network faced a “critical P0 incident," which caused the servers to malfunction. A P0 incident causes interruption while users are doing certain tasks.
What is a CDN?
A CDN is a network of servers spread across regions that distributes content from an origin server to servers throughout the world. A CDN uses cached content in a server closer to the user for distributing content quickly.
What did Cloudflare say?
Cloudflare in a blog post explained the outage was caused by a change that was part of a project to increase resilience in its data centres.
"Today ... Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of our data centres. Unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic. This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations," Cloudflare said in a blog post.
"Depending on your location in the world, you may have been unable to access websites and services that rely on Cloudflare," it added.
Cloudflare also clarified that this was an error and not the “result of an attack or malicious activity."
What is a 500 internal server error?
It is one of the most common HTTPS errors, which means something is wrong with the website’s server.
The error usually shows up when the server is experiencing some problem, but the root cause cannot be found as there could be multiple reasons for that.
