Major Internet Outage Takes Down Amazon, Hulu, Dozens Of Apps

Dozens of apps and websites were down on Sunday (August 30) morning due to a major internet outage. The outage brought down Amazon, Hulu, Venmo, Starbucks, Xbox Live, and dozens of other services.

The issue was caused by an IP outage at internet service provider CenturyLink, which provides services for Cloudflare, a web service company that helps sites handle peak loads of users and protect them from malicious cyber attacks. When Cloudflare's servers went down, they brought down many of the services they support.

"Today, we saw a widespread Internet outage online that impacted many multiple providers," a Cloudflare representative said in an email to The Verge. "This was not a Cloudflare-specific outage. Level 3/CenturyLink was responsible for an outage that affected many Internet services, including Cloudflare. Cloudflare's automated systems detected the problem and routed around them, but the extent of the problem required manual intervention as well."

CenturyLink identified the problem and deployed a fix, restoring the sites that went down.

"We are able to confirm that all services impacted by today's IP outage have been restored. We understand how important these services are to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this outage caused," CenturyLink wrote on Twitter.

Photo: Getty Images