Web accelerator CloudFlare is having network-wide DNS issues, and it looks like all sites that use it as a front-end proxy are down as a result. The company has confirmed the outage with a Tweet that says: “we’re experencing a network-wide issue. Looking into the root cause”. If you have a site using it, you could always try to revert back to your old DNS settings, but I think that they will most likely solve it before any change in those settings will have propagated to the Internet.
Yes, it’s one of those moments where using something like Amazon Route 53 is useful as it allows you to switch DNS settings within 60 seconds. Of course, this won’t affect any DNS server which is caching your IP for a while, but I’ve done some tests, and with a low TTL, you can re-route a lot of traffic very quickly to another server (or here, to the original server).
If you are not familiar with CloudFlare, it is a service that makes a copy of your website to host and deliver it in a more efficient way. It is basically serving as a content delivery network for the whole site (including web pages) where traditional CDNs are mostly used to cache static content like images etc. This offloads your server (called the “origin” server in CDN lingo) and because the service starts for free, it has gotten quite a following. Good luck to all CloudFlare customers.
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