[2019-07-02] CloudFlare Outage Takes Down Coinbase, CoinMarketCap

[hatshepsut93]

A brief outage Tuesday morning at 10:00AM Eastern took down a number of crypto information and trading sites including Coinbase and CoinMarketCap. The issues cleared up around 10:18AM and most sites seem to be running again.

Read full article: https://www.coindesk.com/cloudflare-outage-takes-down-coinbase-coinmarketcap-and-other-top-crypto-websites

Just a few hours ago, I experienced this too - I've tried visiting some sites, including bitcointalk, and got "cloudflare 502" errors. This just shows how centralized the Internet becomes, when so many sites are relying on Cloudflare, that when it goes down, you feel like the whole Internet is down.

[Schirer]

Couldn't reach bitcointalk few hours ago. Had " 502 Error; Cloudfare" . Then tried some other sites which also was down , this was indicator that cloudfare is the problem not bitcointalk site as I thought at the begging.

This is so interesting that one company which in my mind is something independent from websites, can bring down so many websites at once.

[Kemarit]

I think in the last few days, a lot of websites is down due to Cloudfare. A bit scary though, specially for us crypto enthusiast wherein time is really very important. Imagine, you trading and right at the very moment of you executing your trades, website wentdown, cursing the trading platform. LOL. Just like what we say, time is gold. It's time for Cloudfare to step up the game, otherwise they will received the blame for millions of crypto enthusiast who lost or not profit in those crucial moments. So it will be ironic to see a company that supposed to protect websites from attacks has it's own problem.

[hatshepsut93]

I think in the last few days, a lot of websites is down due to Cloudfare. A bit scary though, specially for us crypto enthusiast wherein time is really very important. Imagine, you trading and right at the very moment of you executing your trades, website wentdown, cursing the trading platform. LOL. Just like what we say, time is gold. It's time for Cloudfare to step up the game, otherwise they will received the blame for millions of crypto enthusiast who lost or not profit in those crucial moments. So it will be ironic to see a company that supposed to protect websites from attacks has it's own problem.

This centralization is worrying, because companies like Cloudflare can have so much power over the Internet, they can censor and disrupt the Internet on behalf of governments or other actors. Bitcoin itself is very robust and no one will be able to truly take it down ever, but a lot of its ecosystem is centralized, like the mentioned exchanges that suffered from Cloudflare's outage - if someone can cripple that ecosystem, they would also cripple Bitcoin.

[cabron]

I think in the last few days, a lot of websites is down due to Cloudfare. A bit scary though, specially for us crypto enthusiast wherein time is really very important. Imagine, you trading and right at the very moment of you executing your trades, website wentdown, cursing the trading platform. LOL. Just like what we say, time is gold. It's time for Cloudfare to step up the game, otherwise they will received the blame for millions of crypto enthusiast who lost or not profit in those crucial moments. So it will be ironic to see a company that supposed to protect websites from attacks has it's own problem.

This centralization is worrying, because companies like Cloudflare can have so much power over the Internet, they can censor and disrupt the Internet on behalf of governments or other actors. Bitcoin itself is very robust and no one will be able to truly take it down ever, but a lot of its ecosystem is centralized, like the mentioned exchanges that suffered from Cloudflare's outage - if someone can cripple that ecosystem, they would also cripple Bitcoin.

There is an option not to use cloudfare but its just too useful for websites as part of security as well. But Yes they can cripple the operation of the businesses. There must be something to be done to prevent it. It also happened yesterday with a Bad gateway error including those gambling sites I played on.

This is related to DNS right? Does web3 operates the same way too under cloudfare?

[BitHodler]

Imagine, you trading and right at the very moment of you executing your trades, website wentdown, cursing the trading platform.

I'm sure it will suck for the traders affected, but that's what you have to accept being potentially subject to when using an exchange-- exchanges have proven to be unreliable themselves, and there is Cloudflare too that can mess up.

I think the main problem is that people get worried that the exchange is hacked and is down for that reason. One unexpected outage and there is a fud storm on social media until the exchange is back online.

It's pretty shocking how one entity such as Cloudflare can have that much impact on the global internet with how sites become unavailable. It's an easy target for governments to filter all our data if they so wish.

[rodel caling]

There is an option not to use cloudfare but its just too useful for websites as part of security as well. But Yes they can cripple the operation of the businesses. There must be something to be done to prevent it. It also happened yesterday with a Bad gateway error including those gambling sites I played on.

This is related to DNS right? Does web3 operates the same way too under cloudfare?
[/quote]

So did you mean you're suggesting not use cloudflare, can you share that option you are suggesting, because most of the website are using cloudflare even the crypto gambling site they use it if not wrong for that. To avoid this hassle because possible to manipulate control the function of crypto exchange.

[Kakmakr]

It was much broader that Crypto currency related sites, because even services like WhatsApp / Discord and other popular social media sites went down or their services were disrupted because of this. Contrary to popular believe, this was not an attack on their system, but rather a "bad software" update that had to be "rolled back". 

I strongly believe hackers will target Cloudflare even more now, since they saw the impact that it had on 1000s of internet sites all around the world. They should beef up their security and do proper Alfa and Beta testing on their software, before they release it. 

[Theb]

Shouldn't companies like Cloudfare under content delivery and security service be liable on all kinds of losses incurred brought by their service's downtime? I think it just makes sense to do so especially for the ones with crypto exchanges running on their platform or for any kind of websites using their services. If they are liable trust me server downtimes won't happen as much often as we see now, they'll just be scared of the expenses they will incure because of that.

[1Referee]

It was a perfect event to signal how centralized the internet actual is, and I'm pretty sure startups will pop up trying to take advantage of this to market themselves.

It's very annoying for people using affected sites, but if CF didn't fuck up this badly, we might not have seen startups take advantage of what happened. Don't forget that in order to solve a problem, there has to be a problem, and we have witnessed how severe the problem actually is.

That being said, I saw so many noobs complaining about CMC being down that it was almost embarrasing to read through some of the posts on social media. How can CF do that to these noobs.... How are they supposed to check if shitcoin nr 145 has lost or gained a few ranks if CMC isn't working.