As large parts of the internet ground to a halt yesterday lunchtime, it was a timely reminder of how much we depend on the web, and the incredibly powerful systems that sit behind and control it.

The outage was due to a network failure at Cloudflare (CF), who protect approximately a fifth of all global websites. As an overview, CF run security services for online businesses, such as checking visitors are humans rather than bots. They are the market leader in this field, and a failure like this is surprising as such networks are designed to avoid a single point of failure.

There is a full technical explanation here >>

The issue affected around 50% of our client base, as we run CF services on one of our servers.

In situations like this, it is the equivalent of a power-cut at home when the lights won’t turn on. The problem is at a much higher level than our server, so the issue cascades down to the individual websites we host. Whilst there’s nothing that can be done in the short term to mitigate the problem, we were closely following the CF updates all afternoon to monitor the situation, ready to take any action should it be advised.

For peace of mind, the issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. This was purely a technical issue, and all websites hosted at BY Design remain secure, intact and fully functioning this morning.