The down games and services, among many
Good morning, the internet is broken.
In what seems to be a large scale outage affecting a huge number of large websites and online video games, users and players are having trouble logging in, and many can’t load sites or get past error messages in games at all.
Right now the culprit appears to be Cloudflare, which has its fingers in a million internet pies, and why if there’s a problem with it, that affects any number of sites and services. (Update: This has now been confirmed not to be on Cloudflare, but instead a Level 3/Centurylink issue).
On the gaming side, among the games having trouble we have Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Warzone, GTA 5 and Online, League of Legends, Apex Legends, Valorant, Destiny 2, FIFA, World of Warcraft, Fall Guys and for some, full services like PSN, Xbox Live and Steam, though as of right now, I can get into those.
Warzone
I’ve tested a few different games, and some do appear to be coming back online with the big spike happening around an hour or so ago around 6 AM when everything went down. I can’t get into Call of Duty. I was able to get past a very, very long load for Destiny 2, but once inside, I am constantly getting “connecting to servers” issues, so things do not seem terribly stable. I managed to get into Fortnite just fine.
In short, this may be on the tail end of getting resolved, though some things are still down and it may take a while for things to settle and get back to normal. You might want to avoid gaming early this morning until it’s all fully fixed, lest you get booted from a match amid issues.
Destiny 2
We’ll likely learn the details of what exactly caused this later, but if this was Cloudflare, I am not seeing anything from them directly and of course, their own site is down, either a result of this problem, or a rush of everyone trying to head over there to check.
We have seen situations like this crop up from time to time, a reminder of how fundamentally fragile the internet actually is, and how huge chunks of it rely on singular companies to keep everything running smoothly. Internet problems are the last thing we need in a pandemic, so let’s hope this is behind us quickly here.
Update: Cloudflare is working on the issue:
Cloudflare
Update 2: This is actually a Level 3/Centurylink issue that Cloudflare was working to fix on their end. Here is a statement on the issue from Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming:
“Today we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted many multiple providers. This was not a Cloudflare-specific outage. Level 3/CenturyLink was responsible for an outage that affected many Internet services, including Cloudflare. Cloudflare's automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well.”
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels Herokiller and Herokiller 2, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.
