Cloudflare issues affecting Metabunk

[jarlrmai]

Cloudflare seems to be having some issues which is affecting access to MB, I have been able to get in via VPN but it seems intermittent.

 

[Mick West]

Metabunk and a good chunk of the internet have been down. It's been going in and out (VPN probably isn't making a difference, it's just random)

 

[flarkey]

Me too on numerous websites, not just MB.

 

[FatPhil]

I'm still seeing it here (this post has failed to post a couple of times).

On the up-side, it's taken down twitter and chatgpt too

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.

Cloudflare said in a statement it had seen "a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services beginning at 11:20 UTC" which had caused errors for traffic passing through its network.

"We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic," it said, adding "we are all hands-on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors."

-- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c629pny4gl7o

Downdetector (which ironically uses cloudflare for hosting), shows problem reports peaking for everything from amazon/aws to MS Live365/Azure to Spotify to Grindr to ....

 

[Mendel]

It took Cloudflare about 3 hours to fix.
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ had regular updates.

 

[Ravi]

Rather "interesting" to understand that/how many sites go black when a company forgets to flip a switch.

 

[FatPhil]

Rather "interesting" to understand that/how many sites go black when a company forgets to flip a switch.

People chose to not understand SPoFs. It's not as if we had an AWS outage only >checks calendar< just under 4 weeks ago.

 

[jarlrmai]

The cloud is just someone else's computer/s

 

[Gary C]

Update published on Ars Technica

After the company investigated the "spike in unusual traffic," Cloudflare's spokesperson provided a more detailed update, telling Ars, "the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...re-outage-blamed-on-mysterious-traffic-spike/

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

I am still experiencing a lot of issues with pages not loading on Metabunk. However, if I VPN through a server in San Francisco, it all works fine. Maybe Cloudflare's node near me in Boston still has issues?

 

[jarlrmai]

I am still experiencing a lot of issues with pages not loading on Metabunk. However, if I VPN through a server in San Francisco, it all works fine. Maybe Cloudflare's node near me in Boston still has issues?

I am as well, something is not right

The page loads sometimes then it times out, then I close the browser and it works, it could all just be intermittent and what I am doing is placebo..

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

I am as well, something is not right

The page loads sometimes then it times out, then I close the browser and it works, it could all just be intermittent and what I am doing is placebo..

For me a bunch of stuff either loads very slowly, or doesn't load at all, on my regular Comcast internet connection. But when I VPN through San Francisco, everything works perfectly, no issues at all. I've tested it a few times and seems reproducible.

My guess is that some of their nodes which serve content are still having serious issues and some requests are getting routed to those. The last internet router you are coming from affects which CDN node you get routed to, which I'm guessing it why works when I VPN through San Francisco.

 

[jarlrmai]

Cloudflare really just prevents DDOS afaik no aspects of MB are hosted by it, it could be certain other elements of MB or linked /embedded content is having geo issues, but I am having similar issues here in the UK to you in the the US, and it seems limited to MB...

 

[JMartJr]

FWIW, no issues from Charlotte, NC today. I experienced the same issues yesterday for at least part of the day, using VPN for a different location did not make te problems disappear yesterday, nor does it seem to make them appear today. Issues yesterday were with maybe a quarter of the sites I tried to visit.

But yeah, today I'm not having issues.

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

Cloudflare really just prevents DDOS afaik no aspects of MB are hosted by it, it could be certain other elements of MB or linked /embedded content is having geo issues, but I am having similar issues here in the UK to you in the the US, and it seems limited to MB...

It depends on the configuration but one way Cloudflare prevents DDoS is by intercepting static content requests to the backend server and serving them out of Cloudflare's distributed cache. So if caching is enabled and a request to Metabunk gets intercepted by Cloudflare as a cache-hit, but the server Cloudflare tries to serve the cached response from is broken or incorrectly thinking it has the cached content, it never reaches Metabunk's "real" server, and also the cached version never gets returned either. Or it may get returned very slowly either because the cache times out and it falls back to a non-cache request, or because Cloudflare does eventually respond but takes longer than it should. On my side the issue also seems limited to Metabunk.

 

[purpleivan]

I've had issues throught the middle portion of the day, here in the UK. A mix of some pages timing out and others loading incompletely (missing images and sometimes whole comments).

Seems to have been working fine for the last few hours though.

Editing to update:
Spoke too soon. I just had a bunch of pages time out on me.

I wonder if it's related to my typical behaviour when entering the site, which is to open up any unread threads, one after the other, over a few seconds, with the plan being to read through each in turn. I didn't do that the previous couple of times I took a look at Metabunk (just opened a single thread), but I did when I returned a few minutes ago and found most of the pages timed out.

 

[Mick West]

I reset some stuff with Cloudflare, and it seems to be mostly back to normal now?

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

I reset some stuff with Cloudflare, and it seems to be mostly back to normal now?

Just checked and at least for me everything is loading like normal again.

 

[jarlrmai]

I am still having issues..

 

[purpleivan]

It's working fine for me here. Just did my usual "arrive at New Posts page and quickly open up tabs for all unread threads" thing and no loading issues this time.

 

[Gary C]

A lot of other sites are still lagging pretty badly for me in central Maryland. I wasn't able to track it yesterday because of the old backhoe vs fiber-optic cable bug.

(I hate when that happens.)

 

[NorCal Dave]

Could not log in at all yesterday evening from northern California. Seems to be working now.

 

[Mick West]

There was an additional issue with Cloudflare not liking my new SSL certificate, which was updated yesterday. I quickly fixed that, but there might have been some residual errors, maybe in combination with the general Cloudflare malaise. They have had some more spikes in problems in the past 24 hours, but hopefully all fixed now.

 

[jarlrmai]

It now seems fine from my perspective both using and not using a VPN