At 2625 meters (8612 feet) above sea level, Bogotá (Colombia) is one of the four highest capital cities in the world. Now, it is also home to Cloudflare's 149th data center.

This is the 29th city to be added just in March, and joins our existing Colombia datacenter in Medellín, launched four years ago.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by nigel_sb

Bogotá is the third largest city in South America after São Paulo (Brazil) and Lima (Peru). Bogotanos affectionately known as Rolos are proud of their city with its rich cultural heritage, and its modern transportation systems (Ciclovias, Transmilenio) despite the heavy traffic. Whether you are visiting the world famous gold museum or savoring the mouthwatering Ajiaco soup, Bogotá has something for everyone, and visitors are always warmly received by the locals.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by krossbow

Bogotá is our 11th deployment in the Latin America and Caribbean Region, and is located at a Tier III facility in the Bogota Free Trade Zone specially developed to attract ICT Investments. We'll continue our expansions in the Latin America and Caribbean region (and around the world!).

Come meet the Cloudflare team at the LACNIC29 Meeting in end April in Panama.

This downtime was the result of a BGP route leak by Internexa, an ISP in Latin America. Internexa accidentally directed large amounts of traffic destined for CloudFlare data centers around the world to a single data center in Medellín, Colombia. At the same time Internexa also leaked routes belonging to Telecom Argentina causing disruption in Argentina. This was the result of Internexa announcing via BGP that their network, instead of ours, handled traffic for CloudFlare. This miscommunication caused a flood of traffic to quickly overwhelm the data center in Medellín. The incident lasted 49 minutes, from 15:08UTC to 15:57UTC.

The exact impact of the route leak to our customers’ visitors depended on the geography of the Internet. Traffic to CloudFlare’s customers sites dropped by 50% in North America and 12% in Europe. The impact on our network in Asia was isolated to China. Traffic from South America was also affected as data centers there had to cope with an influx of traffic normally handled elsewhere.

In the past, we’ve written about the inherent fragility of the Internet’s core routing system, and the problem of “route leakage”. Throughout 2014, we’ve seen numerous high profile leaks. In April an Indonesian ISP leaked routes for large swathes of the Internet for a two hour period. Then in September portions of the Internet went offline because of a route leak when a hosting company leaked 400,000 routes, and back in March Google’s DNS was inaccessible in parts of the world because of a route leak. Route leakage is a hard problem that impacts every Internet service provider with no obvious or quick solution.

Today’s incident was unrelated to our recent announcement of Universal SSL, and was not the result of an attack. We worked directly with Internexa to resolve the route leak, and all CloudFlare systems are now operating normally. For the time being, we have quarantined the Medellín data center and disabled connectivity with Internexa. CloudFlare still has plenty of capacity to continue operating our network without that data center while we work with Internexa to understand the exact cause of their route leak. We are beginning an internal post-mortem to ensure that our internal protocols were followed and to identify areas for improvement.

Finally, we plan to proactively issue service credits to accounts covered by SLAs. Any amount of downtime is completely unacceptable to us. The entire CloudFlare team remains focused on delivering the best service to customers worldwide.

“What’s that? CloudFlare’s 28th data center is in Medellin, Colombia!?”

With the World Cup at an end, so too is our latest round of data center expansion. Following deployments in Madrid, Milan and São Paulo, we are thrilled to announce our 28th data center in Medellin, Colombia. Most of Colombia’s 22 million Internet users are now mere milliseconds away from a CloudFlare data center.

Our deployment in Medellin is launched in partnership with Internexa, operators of the largest terrestrial communications network (IP backbone) in Latin America. Internexa operates over 28,000 km of fibre crossing seven countries in the continent. Our partnership was formed over a shared vision to build a better Internet—in this case, by localizing access to content within the region. Today, it is estimated that as much as 80% of content accessed in Latin America comes from overseas. It is with great pride that, as of now, all 2 million sites using CloudFlare are available locally over Internexa’s IP backbone. Let’s just say we’ve taken a bite out of this percentage (and latency)!

Lots of bits in Medellin

If your Internet service provider (ISP) is not connected to Internexa, fear not. We are constantly at work to improve our connectivity, and we’ve only begun our expansion throughout Latin America.

One of of our missions here at CloudFlare is to give any website owner the tools and tricks used by the Internet giants to increase the speed and security of their websites. With a few clicks of a button it is now possible to make your site fast in Colombia (and 27 other locations around the world), protect it from the largest DDoS attacks and ensure its availability 100% of the time. Que chévere!