Cloudflare is an American company that provides Internet security and DDoS mitigation services to its customers. Today, such problems are extremely relevant, because cybercrime has intensified in today’s world and cyber-attacks have been increasingly powerful and prolonged. The company’s services operate as a reverse proxy for the website and guarantee completely secure access to any resources.
The company’s offices are located in major cities around the world such as London, Singapore, Champaign, Austin, Boston, and Washington. But the headquarters is in San Francisco. The company was established back in 2009 by three friends working on Project Honey Pot. Within five years of their activity, the services were able to neutralize the most powerful attack at that time with the intensity of 400 Gbps, while the peak rate reached 500 Gbps. It was a fairly high level for that year.
Until 2020, the company operated without significant DNS outages, but it was 2020 when the world’s most powerful cyber-attack took place, and it targeted suspension of Cloudflare services. After all, problems with this company’s outages could cause the shutdown of many popular services, and this is exactly what happened. Due to the inability to operate properly, most companies incurred significant financial and information losses.
Such well-known services as Riot Games, Patreon, Destiny, Feedly, Discord were greatly affected. Furthermore, even DownDetector, the website to track failures and reasons for disconnection, became inaccessible.
It is worth noting that the company’s team responded to the situation rather fast and posted the news that the problem had been faced due to a cyber-attack. The representatives decided to come out into the open and warn their customers. The developers assured the users that in the future they would be ready for such powerful DDoS attacks and would be able to quickly identify and neutralize them. The outage did not last, it was 27 minutes long only, but in such a short period, traffic dropped by 50%. However, only certain regions were affected, not the entire network. Exposed regions included London, Paris, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Washington, and many others. Despite the fact that the outage was short, it caused a lot of problems.