An ongoing Cloudflare outage has profoundly hit Nepali online sites including many media outlets. On November 18, the outage was noticeable from around 06:00 PM as many sites started showing “Internal server error”. As a result, Onlinekhabar, Ratopati, etc. have gone down.
In response, Cloudflare has said, “Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue that potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
For the unaware, Cloudflare is a cloud service provider that deals with security, performance, etc. for websites. And it’s used by millions of sites globally, so when its servers are affected, the websites are also directly impacted. Even the AI platform ChatGPT uses Cloudflare for secure services.
As I checked ChatGPT.com, it shows a notice, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
The company’s real-time status page also acknowledged, “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.“
Cloudflare server issue hit Nepali websites
The Cloudflare outage has impacted Nepali sites, preventing them from working normally. As of writing this article, websites have been going on and off. This outage has affected many blogs and online news media outlets. Below are the snapshots of the two online news media’s homepages:
When will sites come back live?
Cloudflare is actively working on restoring its services. And while there’s no confirmation on when the service will come back live, we can only expect it to happen soon. Such outages are not rare and are expected to be solved shortly. Thankfully, there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of hacking, which could have made things much worse.