The Turkey Blocks monitoring network has detected access failures affecting hundreds of websites hosted on the Cloudflare CDN including popular news sites Cumhuriyet, Diken, BirGun, several mobile apps and platform REST APIs as of 1:00AM local time.
Update: Service has been restored as of 2:15AM. The cause of the incident remains under investigation.
Thousands of major websites offline in #Turkey as of 1:00AM; whole #Cloudflare CDN network affectedhttps://t.co/6DkPft6LrJ pic.twitter.com/uhboOKSxXt
— Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) June 4, 2017
Affected providers include TTNet and TurkSat/UyduNet, two major landline providers, while mobile services and other ISPs remained unaffected. At the time of writing, connections exhibited severe latency, with a page taking around three minutes to load under testing conditions.
Update: Services back online in #Turkey as of 2:15AM; anomalies detected in forensic network traffic captureshttps://t.co/6DkPftomQj pic.twitter.com/1Jb0PrYwqv
— Turkey Blocks (@TurkeyBlocks) June 4, 2017
The services remained available outside at multiple vantage points outside of Turkey, although it’s unclear if other regions are affected; hence the extent of the outage and underlying cause is not yet known and the outage has not been attributed to any censorship scheme. Similar issues have previously been connected to attempts by authorities to block individual websites or filter specific content.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network which website owners use to protect infrastructure from cyber-attacks such as Denial of Service attacks, as well as partially anonymising the origin web host. The service comes in free and commercial tiers.
Turkey Blocks is an independent, non-partisan network monitoring observatory built on open technology; winner of the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award 2017 [ methodology | contact | about ]