Photo Credit: United Nations Photo (Flickr)

On September 19, 1985 Mexico City was hit with the most damaging earthquake in its history. Yesterday -exactly 32 years later- Mexico’s capital and neighbouring areas were hit again by a large earthquake that caused significant damage. While the scale of the destruction is still being assessed, countless people passed away and the lives of many have been disrupted. Today, many heroes are on the streets focusing on recovery and relief.

We at Cloudflare want to make it easy for people to help out those affected in central Mexico. The Mexico Earthquake app will allow visitors to your site to donate to one of the charities helping those impacted.

The Mexico Earthquake App takes two clicks to install and requires no code change. The charities listed are two well respected organizations that are on the ground helping people now.

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If you wanted to add your own custom list of charities for disaster relief or other causes, feel free to fork the source of this app and make your own.

El 19 de septiembre de 1985 la Ciudad de México fue afectada por uno de los peores sismos en su historia. Ayer - exactamente 32 años después - la CDMX y áreas circunvecinas fueron afectadas por otro fuerte sismo. Aunque la escala de la destrucción todavía no se conoce a fondo, muchísimas personas han sufrido daños. Miles de héroes mexicanos se enfocan en búsqueda, rescate y reconstrucción.

En Cloudflare queremos poner nuestro granito de arena y asegurarnos que los donativos para los afectados puedan llegar de forma fácil. Nuestra app Mexico Earthquake permitirá a aquellos que visitan tu sitio web que donen a asociaciones civiles que apoyan a los damnificados.

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Si quieres agregar otras organizaciones y/o caridades, puedes modificar el código fuente disponible aquí.

As Irma is now forecast to hit southern Florida as category 5 this weekend with gusty winds reaching up to 155mph, it is also expected that Internet infrastructure in the region will suffer.

At the time of writing, we haven’t noticed any decrease in traffic in the region of Miami despite calls to evacuate.

Contrary to popular belief, Internet wasn't built for the purpose of resisting a nuclear attack. That doesn't mean that datacenters aren't built to resist catastrophic events.

The Miami datacenter housing servers for Cloudflare and other Internet operators is classified as Tier IV. What does this tiering mean? As defined by the ANSI (American National Standards Institute), a Tier IV datacenter is the stringent classification in term of redundancy of the critical components of a datacenter: power and cooling. It guarantees 99.995% uptime per year, that is only 26 minutes of unavailability. Tier IV datacenters provide this level of uptime by being connected to separate power grids, allowing their customers to connect their devices to both of these grids. They also provide fuel-powered backup generators, which can themselves be made redundant, for up to 96 hours of autonomy.

Data center facilities have already taken precautionary measures during these last days, one of them contacting their customers with the following (excerpt):

• The generators have been tested, fuel tanks are full, levels verified.

• Special arrangements have been made to make sure staff is available on site as necessary to maintain operability standards.

• We will secure hotel rooms near the sites, and have cots, MREs, and other emergency supplies on site should the situation become extreme.

Due to their importance in Internet infrastructure, Tier IV datacenters also have the most available connectivity to the Internet. This is the case for our Miami data center, which is connected to multiple Tier 1 transit providers and Internet Exchanges and will provide backup routes in case of an outage with a particular infrastructure.

As a last resort, in the event our Miami datacenter would be taken offline, our Anycast routing will smoothly reroute packets to our nearest data centers in the United States: Tampa, Atlanta and Ashburn (Washington DC).

Our technical teams will take all the necessary steps to ensure our services stay online during these unfortunate events. We’d like to remind our users to follow all precautions, and evacuate the regions as advised by the local authorities.

On Tuesday, September 5th, the government of Togo decided to restrict Internet access in the country following political protests. The government blocked social networks and rate-limited traffic, which had an impact on Cloudflare.

This adds Togo to the list of countries like Syria (twice), Iraq, Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, etc that have restricted or revoked Internet access.

The second event happened on Wednesday, September 6th, when a category 5 hurricane ravaged the Caribbean Islands.

The affected countries at the moment are:

• Anguilla

• Antigua and Barbuda

• British Virgin Islands

• Puerto Rico

• Saint Barthelemy

• Saint Kitts and Nevis

• Saint Martin

• Sint Maarten

• U.S. Virgin Islands

Most of the network cables are buried underground or laying at the bottom of the oceans but the hardware which relies on electricity is the first one to go down.

Cell towers sometime have their own power source thus allowing local phone calls but without a backbone no outside access is possible.

The Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) is an Internet registry that collects routes announced over the Internet and can display the reachability of a country.A few networks went black in Saint Martin island. Orange Caraïbes announced in a press release that they repaired their network at 14:00 local time (18:00 UTC). On the graph we can see that it recovered at 19:00 UTC.

While the routers were going back online, the end-user traffic was severely reduced on the edge of Cloudflare.

Saint Kitts did not go offline, but traffic was reduced at 08:00 am local time on Wednesday.

Both Saint Martin and Sint Maarten share the same island, which was one of the most affected by the hurricane. According to the New York Times, the island was badly hit at around 10:00 am local time on September 6th.

Antigua and Barbuda started losing connectivity when the storm approached at 10:00 pm local time on Tuesday 5th September.

The U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico were also strongly affected.

This final image shows the different times when the hurricane reaches every island:

While the Internet was designed to sustain a nuclear attack and can re-route within seconds, islands are often isolated with fewer routing options for provider than on the mainland (3 or 4 instead of 10 or 15).During natural events like this one, the Internet is crucial as a resource for communication, since people use it to tell their family abroad they are safe and to find shelter, food and clean water.

If you live in these islands and have Internet access, Google lists the shelters and has public alerts.

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas last Friday as a Category 4 storm. Although Harvey's category was quickly downgraded, the storm lingered around for days, bringing 50 inches of rain to the greater Houston area.

As someone who was born in Houston, it's hard to see my former city hit with such destruction, and to know that many of my friends and fellow Houstonians are in need of help and assistance. Many families have had their entire house flooded out by the storm. Displaced residents are in a state of stagnation and are seeing their supplies diminishing by the day.

The Hurricane Relief app will allow visitors to your site to donate to one of the charities helping those impacted in Houston:

The Hurricane Relief App takes two clicks to install and requires no code change. The charities listed are recommended by NPR.

Install Now

If you wanted to add your own custom list of charities for disaster relief or other causes, feel free to fork the source of this app and make your own.

Photo credit: Hy Chalmé/Instagram

Now that Hurricane Sandy has passed and the flood waters have begun to recede, we wanted to recap what we saw over the last 24 hours across the CloudFlare network.

Our network is designed to survive hurricanes and other natural disasters, so we were confident even if some of our data centers that were in the hurricane's path failed, traffic would immediately be transferred to the next closest facility. That said, our preference is always that all our data centers remain online and able to continue to serve traffic.

Yesterday morning our ops team met to plan for the potential loss of our facilities in Newark, NJ, which we refer to by the airport code EWR, and potentially Ashburn, VA, which we refer to by the airport code IAD. Our equipment is located in an Equinix facility in both locations and we confirmed that they had taken steps to ensure their systems were tested and as hurricane-ready as they could be.

Data centers are setup so that, if power from the grid is disrupted, they switch to stored backup power until generators can kick in. In EWR, power is stored in what are, effectively, a series of car batteries. Enough power is stored in the batteries that the data center can continue to run without a new source of power for several minutes. The diesel generators are setup to kick in within that time period, usually less than a minute after a power failure is detected. The generators are intended to be able to power the facilities indefinitely so long as there is sufficient fuel. Most of the data centers from which we operate worldwide are considered "critical infrastructure" and, during an emergency, they are second in line, behind only hospitals, for delivery of diesel fuel.

The generators at our EWR facility would get a test as the storm passed overhead. At 01:31 EDT, several hours after the storm had made landfall, we received notice EWR had lost grid power. As designed, power was immediately transferred to the batteries and then to the generators. The incident description read: "Equinix IBX reported a utility power disturbance and transferred customer loads to generator power. No customers have been impacted and Site Staff reports that sufficient fuel supplies are available. Next update will be when a significant change to the situation occurs." Our systems continued to run and we did not detect any power surge or interruption.

At 08:32 EDT, we received notice that one of the EWR generators had failed: "Equinix IBX reports customer loads are on generator power, however they have a loss of redundancy do to the failure of generator 4. Engineers are investigating the issue. Next update will be when a significant change to the situation occurs." Data centers are designed for redundancy, so losing a single generator would not cause a power loss. Our systems continued to function as normal and the functional generators continued to power our equipment throughout the day. At 19:09 EDT, 11 and a half hours after the generator originally kicked in, we received notice that grid power had been restored: "Equinix IBX AMFO reports that utility power has been restored."

While we were fortunate that all of CloudFlare's facilities stayed online, other data centers and networks experienced issues. Around 02:10 EDT, our network ops team noticed a change in routing from traffic that usually transited via Level(3)'s Yellow/Atlantic Crossing-2 (AC-2) undersea cable. The cable runs from Bude, United Kingdom to Bellport, New York. While routing changed, it did not impact our customers and our network routed around the problem. We later confirmed with other network operators that AC-2 had experienced a failure.

Several regional data centers experienced outages which caused interruption to their customers' sites. In some cases, our customers had their origin data centers knocked offline. When this happens, CloudFlare's Always Online functionality kicks in and continues to serve a static version of the site until the origin is restored. The graph below illustrates the deviation from normal of websites that have triggered Always Online. At the height of the storm, beginning around 22:30 EDT and lasting until 00:30 EDT, we were 2.5 standard deviations above normal in terms of the sites on our networkwhose origin servers were offline but we were serving static copies of their sites.

One thing that was somewhat surprising is that traffic to our EWR and IAD data centers dropped less than 1% versus normal operations on a regular Monday night. We had speculated that with power outaged affecting a large number of homes and businesses throughout the Northeastern United States, traffic to the data centers would have been more impacted. Our speculation is that while fewer people may have been online, those that still had connectivity were glued to their computers and surfing more than usual.

Everyone at CloudFlare's thoughts are with the people of the Northeastern United States as they begin the process of cleaning up from this extremely destructive storm. Thanks to the police, fire fighters, rescue workers, and the teams on the ground in the region that kept the lights on and allowed us to continue to operate from the region uninterrupted.

• Backup generators have been tested, fuel tanks are full, levels verified, and backup fuel vendors have been placed on standby in the event of extended power interruption;

• Special arrangements have been made to make sure staff are available on site as necessary to maintain operability standards;

• Hotel rooms near the data center have been secured, and have brought in cots, MREs, and other emergency supplies, should the situation become extreme;

• Leak diversion kits, sandbags, tarps, vinyl sheeting, are on hand with which to secure doors and windows; and

• All drains and sump pumps have been verified as free from debris and in working order.

So that's reassuring, but, you know, it's still a freakin' hurricane!

Here's what I find more reassuring: CloudFlare is designed so that whole data centers can go down and the service will keep right on running. From the beginning, we architected our system to minimize single points of failure. We regularly take whole data centers offline without anyone noticing. Traffic flows immediately to the next closest data center and things keep right on rolling.

So bring on Irene. Our Ashburn, VA data center is better prepared than most, but even if it goes down, CloudFlare will keep traffic flowing. And, if you're hosted at a provider that is knocked offline by Irene (or anything else), we've got your back and will do our best to keep you Always Online™ even if your hosting provider goes down.

Finally, for CloudFlare users who are personally in Irene's path: heed the warnings, stay dry, stay safe... we'll watch your site.