Ep. 37: Even Magic Can't Stop Internet Outages

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. Today, we focused on an interesting outage that impacted Cloudflare Magic Transit, a relatively new offering from the CDN provider which aims to efficiently route and protect the network traffic of its customers. On May 3rd at approximately 3:00 PM PDT (10:00 PM UTC), ThousandEyes vantage points connecting to sites using Magic Transit began to detect significant packet loss at Cloudflare’s network edge—with the loss continuing at varying levels, for approximately 2 hours. While the outage impacted some Magic Transit customers more significantly than others, we also observed mitigation actions by at least one customer to avoid the outage and restore the availability of their service to their users. This outage reminds us that no provider is immune to outages, even cloud and global CDN providers. However, with proactive visibility, you can respond quickly to reduce outage impact on your users.