CloudFlare blames Telia Carrier for internet outages

Content delivery and security service CloudFlare has accused Swedish company Telia of being responsible for two massive internet outages.

CloudFlare said it detected the problems on 17 June and 20 June, adding that they were caused by packet loss on the Telia Carrier network, which CloudFlare described as one of its major transit provider backbone networks.

"Typically, transit providers are very reliable and transport all of our packets from one point of the globe to the other without loss - that's what we pay them for. In this case [on 20 June], our packets (and that of other Telia customers), were being dropped," said Jrme Fleury, network engineering manager at CloudFlare, in a blog post.

Fleury added that transit providers are "usually reliable" and therefore fix problems such as packet loss promptly. However, "in this case, that did not happen", he claimed, saying that CloudFlare had to reroute to other Tier 1 providers.

IT Pro has tried to contact Telia multiple times about the claims but had not received a reply at the time of writing.

Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network at CloudFlare, also hit out at Telia in a tweet, saying the company's "reliability over last 60 days [has been] unacceptable" and that CloudFlare would be "deprioritising them until we're confident they've fixed their systemic issues".

Fleury, however, also offered a 'mea culpa' in his blog, saying that Cloud Flare's response time "was not adequate" as well as admitting that the issue was incorrectly identified as being confined to Europe at first.

"We want to reassure you that we are taking all the steps to improve our communication, including implementation of automated detection and mitigation systems that can react much more quickly than any human operator," Fleury added.

"We already have such systems in place for our smaller datacentres and are actively testing their accuracy and efficacy before turning them on for larger PoPs."