What is WARP access that Cloudflare disabled in London during outage
A large-scale outage of Cloudflare servers blocked users worldwide from accessing hundreds of online services today (November 18). The outage, which the IT infrastructure company claims it has fixed, persisted for over 2 hours, affecting popular online services such as ChatGPT, Twitter (X), Spotify, Discord, Canva and others. Millions of users complained of being unable to connect to these services during the outage. The incident highlights the critical role Cloudflare plays in powering the internet backbone through its content delivery and security services. However, while fixing the outage, Cloudflare temporarily disabled WARP access in London. Here, we will discuss what Cloudflare’s WARP access is and what it means for users:
What Cloudflare said about disabling WARP access in London
While fixing the outage, Cloudflare took to its official status page to write: “During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect.”Later on, the company said, “We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London.”
What is Cloudflare’s WARP access and what it means for users
The Cloudflare WARP app is a consumer product that provides a VPN service to secure internet traffic. WARP access refers to Cloudflare’s service that enhances internet security and performance by creating an encrypted tunnel for device traffic.When Cloudflare WARP access is down, it means your device cannot connect to the Cloudflare network. This prevents the app from securing and optimising your internet traffic. At that time, users may have experienced an inability to connect to the internet or encountered slow speeds, even if their underlying internet connection was working correctly.When Cloudflare disabled WARP access in London, users in the city who tried to connect to the internet via the Cloudflare WARP app would’ve experienced connection failures. This was later restored when the company enabled access to the app. Earlier, Cloudflare’s WARP app was also available in India. However, in January, more than half a dozen VPN apps, including Cloudflare’s widely used 1.1.1.1, were reportedly removed from India’s Apple App Store and Google Play Store following intervention from government authorities.According to a document reviewed by TechCrunch and a disclosure made by Google to Lumen, Harvard University’s database that tracks government takedown requests globally, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued removal orders for these apps.Among the affected apps were Hide.me and PrivadoVPN. As per the report, in a communication to one of the affected developers, Apple cited a “demand” from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which deemed the developer’s content to contravene Indian law.
