May 2013 Summaries

On May 31, 2013, CloudFlare experienced a large influx of traffic hitting their Los Angeles data center due to changes in routing during the consolidation process between GTT/nLayer and Inteliquent. This resulted in traffic intended for East Coast US and European data centers being redirected to Los Angeles, causing some machines to overload and return 502 Gateway Errors. The issue was resolved by rebalancing traffic with the help of GTT/nLayer's network team. Approximately 10% of connections were impacted for a 20-minute window, with some users experiencing issues for longer periods depending on their connection to Level3 and if they were pulled to more than one affected location. CloudFlare has since added this scenario to the conditions guarded against to prevent similar issues in the future.

On May 7, 2013, Syria experienced an internet outage for approximately 19 hours and 30 minutes before connectivity was restored. The government claimed that this was due to a cable cut; however, experts believe this is unlikely as all four connection points would need to be severed simultaneously for complete termination of traffic. Additionally, some Syrian IP ranges continued to have internet access during the outage, further discrediting the claim of a cable cut. The incident remains under investigation.

On May 7, 2013 at 18:48 UTC, Syria experienced a complete internet shutdown. This was achieved by systematically withdrawing BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes from the country's border routers, which is the same method used to cut off Syrian internet access in November of the previous year. The event was confirmed through data collected from networks and reports from other monitoring organizations. A video showing the withdrawal of routes into Syria's internet space was generated using BGPlay. Additionally, a graph displaying requests to CloudFlare's network from the Syrian internet space over the last six hours (UTC) was provided. The situation is being closely monitored for any changes in connectivity.