What has been happening on Iraqi websites in the past two hours?
Thousands of websites in various countries around the world, including Iraq, have been down for about two hours, with their return to service fluctuating, lasting only a few minutes at a time.
The outage also affected the “X” platform, where familiar error messages such as “Something went wrong” or “Internal Server Error 500″ appeared, and the homepage stopped updating.
In the United States alone, more than 18,000 complaints were recorded at the peak, while India saw thousands more complaints, especially from creators who were unable to access the revenue-generating dashboard.
The main reason is a widespread technical failure at the American company Cloudflare, which provides protection and website acceleration services to millions of platforms around the world, and among its major clients are “X” itself, in addition to ChatGPT and others.
Netblocks, an organization specializing in monitoring the internet, confirmed that the problem is purely technical in the Cloudflare global network, and is not related to any blocking or internet shutdowns at the country level.
So far, X or Cloudflare has not issued an official statement, but Cloudflare’s service status page shows that engineering teams are working on a solution with external providers.
Amazon, the world’s largest cloud computing provider, also announced that its cloud service had largely recovered after a widespread outage on Monday that affected a range of customers, including government agencies, artificial intelligence companies, and financial platforms.
The company explained that it had identified the source of the glitch in a regional gateway on the East Coast of the United States, and indicated via its status monitoring panel that “most requests should now be fulfilled successfully,” about two hours after the first update about the outage.
Amazon’s cloud computing service powers a large part of the internet, accounting for about a third of the global cloud computing market, meaning that any disruption to it has widespread effects.
Tottenham Hotspur also informed its fans via email that its online ticketing platform was affected, and a spokesperson for the UK tax authority (HMRC) indicated that the authority’s website was also down due to the problem.
While most technical glitches at large companies are quickly resolved, the interconnectedness of digital systems globally means that a failure at a single company can have catastrophic effects on the global economy. Last year, a faulty software update at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. crippled air travel and disrupted systems worldwide, resulting in billions of dollars in losses.
Data from DownDetector showed that other sites, including the gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite and the corporate messaging service Slack, also recorded an increase in user complaints about service disruptions that were potentially related to the outage at Amazon Web Services.
Amazon’s own services also faced problems on Monday, as user complaints about the Alexa voice assistant and the Ring home security system increased.
Shafaq.com