“Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted multiple providers,” said John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare CTO. “Cloudflare’s automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”
CenturyLink, formerly known as Level 3, confirmed there was an IP outage impacting Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and that all services had been restored as of 11:12 am ET. The telecommunications company said it was unable to comment on certain customers because of customer proprietary network information.
Services like Cloudflare are designed to prevent distributed denial of service attacks, in which massive networks of computers send malicious traffic to websites to take them offline. The services also help keep sites running smoothly when traffic spikes during shopping seasons or when a site hosts a viral video.
Update: This story has been updated with more information about CenturyLink, the connection to the services that were disrupted and notes that the service has been restored.