Buenos Aires, November 18 (NA) — An outage in Cloudflare's services caused a massive 'internet blackout' this Tuesday, affecting social networks like X (formerly Twitter) as well as major news portals and streaming platforms.
Given the vast number of sites that depend on this infrastructure, its failure causes a domino effect that translates into a global internet blackout.
But what exactly is Cloudflare and why is its outage so significant globally? According to the Argentine News Agency (NA), the problem lies with one of the most important web infrastructure companies.
What is Cloudflare and what is it for? Cloudflare is a company that offers a series of crucial services for the functioning of the internet, acting mainly as:
Content Delivery Network (CDN): It stores copies of websites on servers distributed worldwide. When a user tries to access a page, Cloudflare delivers the content from the nearest server, which speeds up loading and reduces latency. DNS Services: It manages the domain name system (DNS), which translates website names (e.g., google.com) into IP addresses that computers can understand. DDoS Protection: It defends websites against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which attempt to overload a server with malicious traffic to take it offline. Web Security: It offers a web application firewall (WAF) that protects against various vulnerabilities and cyberattacks.
In essence, Cloudflare acts as a shield and an accelerator for millions of websites worldwide, improving their performance, security, and availability.
What does the '502 Bad Gateway' message that is now being seen mean? When a user tries to access a website protected by Cloudflare and this service experiences a failure, it is common to see the error message '502 Bad Gateway'.
What does this error indicate? It means that a server (in this case, a Cloudflare server) received an invalid response from another server when trying to load the web page. Cloudflare filters this traffic, allowing only legitimate requests to reach the server.
In simpler terms: Your browser tries to connect to Cloudflare. Cloudflare, which acts as an intermediary between your browser and the actual web server, cannot establish a correct connection with the origin server or receives a defective response.
As a result, Cloudflare returns the '502 Bad Gateway' error to you, indicating that it could not fulfill the request to show you the page. This message is a direct sign that the disruption does not originate from the website itself, but from an intermediate service like Cloudflare, which is the one that manages and distributes the content.
