Cloudflare blames Flexential DC outage for its service disruption

Content Delivery Network (CDN), security, and Edge computing company Cloudflare has blamed its November 2 service disruption on a power failure at a Flexential data center in Hillsboro, Oregon.

"On November 2 at 08:50 UTC, Portland General Electric (PGE), the utility company that services PDX-04, had an unplanned maintenance event affecting one of their independent power feeds into the building. That event shut down one feed into PDX-04,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a lengthy post. "Had they informed us, we would have stood up a team to monitor the facility closely and move control plane services that were dependent on that facility out while it was degraded."

However, Flexential's COO, Ryan Mallory, told the media, "There are different scenarios for data center providers to work with the utility to provide capacity back to the grid. PGE had the issue several years ago with wildfires, where the powerlines came down in the Hillsboro area. So there are these types of scenarios that are in place to support the power utility if there is an issue with the grid."

Cloudflare claims three issues hindered its ability to get the generators back online. Flexential failed to inform it about any problems, which were only discovered when its routers began to fail. Moving forward, the company intends to "remove dependencies on our core data centers for control plane configuration of all services and move them wherever possible to be powered first by our distributed network."