Gone offline: how Cloudflare Radar detects Internet outages

Currently, Cloudflare Radar curates a list of observed Internet disruptions (which may include partial or complete outages) in the Outage Center. These disruptions are recorded whenever we have sufficient context to correlate with an observed drop in traffic, found by checking status updates and related communications from ISPs, or finding news reports related to cable cuts, government orders, power outages, or natural disasters.

However, we observe more disruptions than we currently report in the outage center because there are cases where we can’t find any source of information that provides a likely cause for what we are observing, although we are still able to validate with external data sources such as Georgia Tech’s IODA. This curation process involves manual work, and is supported by internal tooling that allows us to analyze traffic volumes and detect anomalies automatically, triggering the workflow to find an associated root cause. While the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center is a valuable resource, one of key shortcomings include that we are not reporting all disruptions, and that the current curation process is not as timely as we’d like, because we still need to find the context.

As we announced today in a related blog post, Cloudflare Continue reading