Telia Carrier Is Blamed For CloudFlare Outage

Swedish network provider Telia caused the massive Internet outage that affected countless users in Europe on June 20, as popular sites like Slack and WhatsApp fell offline.

The outage had a large impact on hosting company CloudFlare, whose customers experienced massive disruptions.

CloudFlare has since posted a blog explaining the incident, and the company’s CEO Matthew Prince has said that CloudFlare will look to use other Tier 1 network providers over Telia in the immediate future.

Unacceptable

“Reliability of @TeliaCarrier over last 60 days unacceptable. Deprioritizing them until we are confident they’ve fixed their systemic issues” he said in a tweet.

Telia is just one of many Tier 1 providers that CloudFlare uses in Europe, and the company said it was able to move traffic away from Telia Carrier when the problem wasn’t immediately fixed.

“Today, June 20, at 12:10 UTC, our systems again detected massive packet loss on one of our major transit provider backbone networks: Telia Carrier,” wrote CloudFlare in the blog post.

“Because transit providers are usually reliable, they tend to fix their problems rather quickly. In this case, that did not happen and we had to take our ports down with Telia at 12:30 UTC.

“Because we are interconnected with most Tier 1 providers, we are able to shift traffic away from one problematic provider and let others, who are performing better, take care of transporting our packets.”

CloudFlare witnessed more than 800,000 522 errors at the time of the outage.

“A 522 HTTP error indicates that our servers are unable to reach the origin servers of our customers,” CloudFlare said.

CloudFlare said it wants to reassure its customers that it is taking steps to improve its own communication, too, including implementation of automated detection and mitigation systems.

“We already have such systems in place for our smaller data centers and are actively testing their accuracy and efficacy before turning them on for larger PoPs,” it said.

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