Cloudflare investigates outage that brought down sites including Zoom and LinkedIn

Summary:

On June 21, 2022, a major Cloudflare outage disrupted thousands of websites and services for approximately an hour. The incident—classified as a “critical P0 incident” in post-mortem reports—stemmed from a configuration error during a routing protocol change. This caused global traffic to be misrouted through overloaded data centers, overwhelming network capacity. Common triggers for such outages include human error during maintenance operations, BGP configuration issues, and software deployment flaws. Cloudflare serves as critical infrastructure for 19% of websites, meaning its outages create outsized internet-wide impacts.

What This Means for You:

• Impact: Immediate inaccessibility of Cloudflare-dependent services (error 502/503)
• Fix: Refresh pages after 60 seconds or use direct IP connections for critical services (see solutions)
• Security: No indications of hacking—this was an internal operational failure
• Warning: Future outages likely during major cloud infrastructure updates

Solutions:

Solution 1: Verify Network Path Integrity

During Cloudflare outages, verify if traffic is being misrouted using network diagnostic tools. Use terminal commands to trace routes to affected domains:

traceroute zoom.us
mtr google.com --report

Look for unusual hopping patterns or timeouts specifically at Cloudflare IP ranges (104.16.0.0/12). Windows users can use PathPing instead.

Solution 2: Leverage Cloudflare’s Status Page

Bookmark Cloudflare’s real-time status dashboard (cloudflarestatus.com) and integrate their API into monitoring systems. The JSON feed provides granular outage details:

curl https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/api/v2/status.json

Monitor for “major_outage” components and follow incident IDs like “jyvv4jy6zk1n” (June 2022 incident). Enable SMS alerts via their subscription feature.

Solution 3: Implement DNS Fallback Systems

Configure automatic DNS failover using tools like AWS Route 53 (failover routing policy) or NS1 (filter chains). Maintain resolution alternatives if Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 becomes unreachable:

nslookup yourdomain.com 8.8.8.8 # Google DNS fallback

Networks should have at least three geographically dispersed DNS resolvers configured with BIND or dnsmasq configurations like:

server=1.1.1.1
server=9.9.9.9
server=208.67.222.222

Solution 4: Deploy Multi-CDN Architecture

Large enterprises should distribute traffic across multiple CDNs. Configure weighted DNS records to split traffic between:

• Cloudflare (30%)
• Akamai (40%)
• Fastly (30%)

Use CDN healthchecks with automation tools like Terraform to dynamically reroute during outages:

resource "aws_route53_record" "cdn" {
  type = "CNAME"
  failover_routing_policy {
    type = "PRIMARY"
  }
}

People Also Ask:

• Q: Why do Cloudflare outages break so many sites? A: They proxy traffic for millions of domains—any disruption becomes immediately widespread.
• Q: Was this a cyberattack? A: No, Cloudflare confirmed it was an internal configuration error during maintenance.
• Q: How long do Cloudflare outages typically last? A: Most resolve within 60-90 minutes; June 2022 incident lasted 75 minutes.
• Q: Can I prevent this affecting my site? A: Yes using multi-CDN strategies and DNS failovers (see Solution 4).

Protect Yourself:

• Sign up for Cloudflare’s early warning system (SMS alerts)
• Maintain static HTML versions of critical pages not requiring CDNs
• Implement service degradation plans (e.g., disable non-essential scripts during outages)
• Conduct quarterly “CDN failure” drills using chaos engineering tools

Expert Take:

“The June 2022 outage revealed just how concentrated internet infrastructure has become—a single misconfiguration at one provider instantly wiped ~3% of global web traffic, demonstrating urgent need for architectural decentralization.” – Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz Infrastructure Partner

Tags:

• Cloudflare outage June 2022 root cause
• Zoom and LinkedIn downtime solutions
• Multi-CDN failover configuration guide
• How to bypass Cloudflare during outages
• DNS fallback best practices
• Detecting network route misconfigurations

*Featured image via source

Edited by 4idiotz Editorial System