What CDN issues appear to be Cloudflare outages?
Recently, many internet services are providing services using CDN.
CDN failures have become a hot topic with the spread of CDN. CDN provider Cloudflare failure along with Akamai have become a hot topic in 2022.
On Twitter, messages like “the internet is broken” and “can’t connect…” to each service that appears to use Cloudflare. A voice came up.
This blog discusses CDN issues and failover that appear to be Cloudflare failures.
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About Cloudflare failures with global impacts
Prevent failures with multi-CDN service
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Cloudflare experienced two outages in 2020. Additionally, an outage occurred in June 2022, affecting popular services in each industry.
Illustration communication service "pixiv", communication service "Discord", free design tool "Canva", and translation tool "DeepL" have all been downloaded, and appear to have been influenced by Cloudflare.
☑︎｜Cause of Cloudflare failure
☑︎ | Problems that appear to be CDN failures
What caused the Cloudflare failure?
Cloudflare outages occurred from different events and were caused by:
In April 2020, a faulty cable was pulled from the patch board, rendering the dashboard and API unusable.
In July 2020, a router configuration change error caused all traffic to be directed to one location, resulting in a 27-minute service outage.
The June 2022 outage occurred in 19 major data centers, including Tokyo, due to a misconfiguration of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
Problems that appear to be CDN failures
If you use a CDN to provide services, in the event of a failure, you may be affected by inaccessibility, restrictions, web content display errors, etc.
pixiv, which appears to have been affected by the Cloudflare outage in June 2022, became inaccessible starting around 15:30 the same day, with access affected only two hours until recovery was reported at 17:30. In order to provide services without interruption, we implement redundancy in hardware and network configuration, but once a failure occurs, CDN requires time to identify the cause due to the size of the CDN, and recovery may take time.
Therefore, companies using CDN need to take countermeasures in case a CDN failure or downtime occurs. One of the measures is multi-CDN risk diversification.
Source: [Restoration] About access problems in pixiv comics
Prevent failures with multi-CDN service
Multi-CDN means using multiple CDN services. This allows further optimization of availability, redundancy configuration, and traffic distribution. Below we introduce the features of using multi-CDN.
☑︎ | Advantages of multi-CDN service
☑︎ | Disadvantages of multi-CDN service
Advantages of multi-CDN service
There are four advantages of configuring with multi-CDN:
1. The impact of failure can be minimized.
If one of your CDNs fails, you can switch to another CDN. This will prevent forwarding services from stopping.
2. Optimal CDN selection
CDN edge locations (distributed delivery bases) can deliver high-quality content if they are provided from a location closer to the user's area.
Since the edge location varies depending on each CDN service, multi-CDN can be used to optimize delivery by configuring, setting, and in some cases building so that the optimal edge location is provided for the area where the service is provided.
3. Respond to large-scale traffic
As introduced in the previous paragraph, depending on your disability, you may not be able to use the service at all.
Multi-CDN allows you to avoid service interruptions by using a CDN that does not fail. For companies concerned about costs due to the use of multiple CDNs, it is recommended that the CDN be standby as a backup in case of a failure rather than running it all the time, and use a different CDN only in case of a failure.
4. Security measures against cyber attacks
Different CDN services have different security levels and measures.
Recently, cyber attacks have been the cause of data center outages, but when one CDN is affected by a DoS/DDos attack, damage can be minimized by switching to another CDN. .
Disadvantages of multi-CDN service
Although there are many benefits to a multi-CDN configuration, it introduces two drawbacks.
The need to create, change, and delete delivery settings for multiple CDNs increases the number of operational tasks associated with the settings.
2. Increased costs
CDN has the advantage of optimizing costs, but in the case of multi-CDN, distribution costs are likely to be high because the distribution capacity of each CDN is distributed and small.
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In this blog, we have explained the impacts and problems caused by CDN failures. The number of companies using CDNs to deliver content is increasing, and once a CDN failure occurs, the impact will have a significant impact not only on companies using CDNs, but also on end users using the service.
To avoid these risks, CDN services must be redundant with multi-CDN. When introducing multi-CDN, we recommend using a professional service provider that handles services from various cloud vendors, as smooth introduction is possible.