Cloudflare has resolved an issue that led to websites serviced by the networking and internet security firm to show 502 ‘Bad Gateway’ errors en masse for half an hour yesterday.

From 2:42pm BST the networking giant suffered a massive spike in CPU utilisation to its network, which Cloudflare is blaming on bad software deployment. This affected websites hosted in territories across the entire world.

Ironically, even Downdetector was knocked offline during the outage

Once this faulty deployment was rolled back, its CTO John Graham-Cumming explained, service was returned to normal operation and all domains using Cloudflare returned to normal traffic levels.

“This was not an attack (as some have speculated) and we are incredibly sorry that this incident occurred,” Graham-Cumming said.

“Internal teams are meeting as I write performing a full post-mortem to understand how this occurred and how we prevent this from ever occurring again.”

The incident affected several massive industries, including cryptocurrency markets, with users not able to properly access exchanges like CoinMarketCap and CoinBase.

Cloudflare issued an update last night suggesting the global outage was caused by the deployment of just one misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) during a routine deployment. The company had aimed to improve the blocking of inline JavaScript used in cyber attacks.

One of the rules it deployed caused CPU to spike to 100% on its machines worldwide, and subsequently led to the 502 errors seen on sites across the world. Web traffic dropped by 82% at the worst point during the outage.

“We were seeing an unprecedented CPU exhaustion event, which was novel for us as we had not experienced global CPU exhaustion before,” Graham-Cumming continued.

“We make software deployments constantly across the network and have automated systems to run test suites and a procedure for deploying progressively to prevent incidents.

“Unfortunately, these WAF rules were deployed globally in one go and caused today’s outage.”

At 3:02pm BST the company realised what was going on and issued a global kill on the WAF Managed Rulesets which dropped CPU back to normal levels and restored traffic, before fixing the issue and re-enabling the Rulesets approximately an hour later.

Many on social media were speculating during the outage that the 502 Bad Gateway errors may be the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. However, these suggestions were fairly quickly quashed and confirmed to be untrue by the firm.

Data centre firm Equinix will invest $1 billion (approximately £793 million) into building six data centres across Europe to support some of the biggest cloud players like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Backed by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Equinix will establish new xScale facilities in key locations around Europe, including London and Paris. They will be based near, or on, the firm’s International Business Exchange (IBX) campuses and provide companies with heightened connectivity and edge computing capabilities.

Equinix is only targeting hyperscale companies initially. These, in addition to Azure and GCP, includes Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to support their unique workloads.

“It has been a long journey to reach this point, but we are tremendously excited to announce the formation of our first xScale data centers joint venture,” said Equinix president and CEO Charles Meyers.

“Partnering with a world-class investment partner like GIC will provide the opportunity to make significant capital investments in order to capture targeted large-footprint deployments while continuing to optimize our capital structure.

“The JV [joint-venture] structure will enable us to extend our cloud leadership while providing significant value to a critical set of hyperscale customers.”

Six xScale data centres, of which two are to be based in London, will allow customers to add core deployments to their existing access points so they can expand on a single platform. These are also specifically-engineered to meet the technical and operational requirements of hyperscale companies’ workloads.

The infrastructure will be managed and staffed by Equinix while being connected to the Equinix global platform in order to provide a non-disrupted experience for hyperscale firms.

“As hyperscale companies expand around the world, they will increasingly look to partners to provide both broad global scale and deep local knowledge when deploying data center space,” said vice president for datacentre infrastructure and services with 451 Research Kelly Morgan.

“By increasing the number of hyperscale facilities in the EMEA region, the joint venture between Equinix and GIC aims to accelerate the adoption of hybrid and multicloud as the IT architecture of choice by companies throughout the region.”

Equinix will sell its London LD10 and Paris PA8 IBX data centre facilities to the fund that manages this $1 billion joint-venture, with new xScale data centres expected to come to fruition on these sites.

New data centres will also be built in Amsterdam, London and on two sites in Frankfurt.

On the 1 July, the Wimbledon Championship will start off a fortnight of grand slam tennis at the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), one of the world’s most traditional sporting events. But the competition isn’t strictly all heritage and old fashion values, it’s also one of the most technologically advanced sporting spectacles around.

In its 49th year, the Championship is using more artificial intelligence technology than ever before to capture the best bits. Powered by sophisticated cloud computing, the tournament now has a raft of data-powered and AI services for organisers, fans and even players to use. From automated highlights packages to performance analytics, Wimbledon is a hive of cutting-edge technology.

Data Points

For 30-years, IBM has been in partnership with Wimbledon and since 1990 the tech giant has collected 62.8 million data points from the championships. There are 18 courts at the AELTC, each with an average of four matches per day (weather permitting) and scanning through this mass data would take many humans far longer than the two weeks of the competition. Instead, IBM’s cloud platform runs in the background, capturing the data and spinning it into everything from player insights to fan based applications.

“It’s about trying to uncover those stories,” said Sam Sneddon, IBM’s client executive. “It’s about trying to help fans, in the moment, when they’re consuming sport, to really know what it takes. Which are the most exciting moments, what are they thinking, and being able to provide those insights to fans wherever they’re watching it.

AI-powered returns

While Roger Federer may be the most successful Wimbledon player of all time, IBM’s Watson AI is the most efficient. Launched last year, the AI-powered service uses cameras and sensors to track the play and create an automated highlights reel. Each bit of action is monitored and ranked via its statistical importance within the match and how much of a cheer it receives from the crowd; even the sound of racket on the ball is measured. At the end of each match, Watson then creates a highlights package within two minutes.

For this year’s competition, players can expect to have their tense facial expressions or celebratory body language examined by Watson, which will use visual image recognition technology to capture their reactions in order to add these to the automated highlights reel. Watson can pick up anything from an agonising grimace to a celebratory roar, which will prompt the machine to automatically clip that point in the match.

“This allows us to clip the highlights package to be really tight, so it knows exactly when play is happening,” Seddon told the Telegraph. “We asked ourselves how do we create video content that’s available really quickly? What are the most exciting moments in a match? You can sit there as a digital editor in a match and make that decision yourself, or you can turn that question over to an AI system.

“Then we had to define what exciting is – well, let’s listen to how excited the crowd are, let’s look how animated the players are, let’s analyse the data and see whether this is a turning point in the match and use of that to generate highlights.”

Player-coach data sets

All these data points are not just for the TV, however, as IBM also provides data analytics to players and coaches to help them read insights into their performance. After each match, personal analysis is available within 20 minutes of it finishing.

All this data is monitored by 48 IBM recruited and trained tennis experts, who capture match statistics at courtside and report back in sub-second response times. IBM says that using tennis players trained on its systems to capture data ensures they read the game faster and can provide data more accurately.

Former champion Andy Murray is set to make a comeback in the doubles, following a serious hip injury and thanks to similar tech provide by Catapult, Murray has been analysing the previous form and comparing it his post-operation technique. Jozef Baker, a product specialist at Catapult, has worked closely with Murray and his strength and conditioning coach Matt Little since 2017.

“The credit for his return to play belongs entirely with Andy and his team, but we look to provide the best tools and hardware and software for Matt to make the best decisions for Andy and his health,” he told Forbes.

“We have been able to use the technology to identify tennis strokes so we have utilised some of that work and we have detected serves from historical data on Andy. We have managed to compare that to what he is doing at the moment during his recovery and from there we took conclusions from a pre-injury Murray and compared them to help Matt in building that workload.”

As such, Wimbledon may be the key event in the tennis calendar, but it also stands as a quiet showcase of some of the most cutting-edge AI and data analysis technology currently available, demonstrating that if the tech can stand up in a high-speed, intense environment, it’s poised reap rewards for the businesses that adopt it. 

The trend involving databases being used for analytics under the ever-popular software as a service (SaaS) model will see 75% of all databases being deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, according to Gartner’s latest predictions.

The IT analyst house also said that just 5% of these will ever be considered by owners to be taken back into on-premise infrastructure as businesses continue to realise the benefits of widespread cloud adoption.

“According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase,” said Donald Feinberg, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.

“We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases — such as data warehousing, data lakes and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

“Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model.”

Research from Gartner shows that worldwide revenue from database management systems was up a significant 18.4% to $46 million and cloud database management systems accounted for 68% of that.

The company also notes that Microsoft and AWS account for more than 75% of the total market growth, indicating a trend towards cloud service providers becoming the new data management platform.

On-premise infrastructure rarely offers built-in capabilities to support cloud integration which is why its growth isn’t as vibrant as its cloud counterparts. The industry is growing, but at a much slower rate and not because of new on-premise deployments, but because of price increases and forced upgrades.

“Ultimately what this shows is that the prominence of the CSP infrastructure, its native offerings, and the third-party offerings that run on them is assured,” said Feinberg. “A recent Gartner cloud adoption survey showed that of those on the public cloud, 81% were using more than one CSP.

“The cloud ecosystem is expanding beyond the scope of a single CSP — to multiple CSPs — for most cloud consumers,” he added.

The UK is adopting the cloud more than others in the EU, according to figures from Eurostat published late last year.

A sixth-place ranking among EU countries for cloud adoption is primarily due to the high rate of British enterprises using some form of cloud service.

British businesses beat the average EU country in this regard by a significant margin, with 41.9% using at least one cloud service compared to the average of 26.2% – a figure beaten only by a handful of Scandinavian nations, Denmark, Sweden and Finland among them. 

Microsoft has applied to join two security boards for representatives of Linux distributions to discuss and coordinate vulnerabilities and security issues.

The linux-distros mailing list is used as a private channel where developers can discuss flaws in Linux systems and co-ordinate fixes for issues that have not yet reached the public domain. The oss-security group is used to discuss vulnerabilities that are already known.

Microsoft’s ‘Linux Kernal Hacker’ Sasha Levin sent an application to join the security boards last week, which could see the Windows developer to be party to behind-closed-doors conversations on ongoing security issues.

Members of this community include Chrome OS, Red Hat, Oracle, SUSEand Amazon Linux AMI.

There are several criteria that organisations need to meet to join the linux-distros group. For example, Levin cited Azure Sphere and Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 as examples of the company actively maintaining Unix-like operating system distro with open source components.

Successful applications must also have a userbase that isn’t limited to their own organisation, which Microsoft said it fits through millions of cores its customers run on systems such as those aforementioned.

Organisations must also be able to demonstrate at least a year-long track record of fixing vulnerabilities, including some on Linux distros, and releasing fixes for known issues within 10 days or fewer.

Applications would also have to gain the recommendation of an individual who has been active on oss-security of years but is not affiliated with the organisation. Levin copied in renowned Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who replied separately in the email chain to vouch for Microsoft’s submission.

“I can vouch for Sasha,” Kroah-Hartman said. “He is a long-time kernel developer and has been helping with the stable kernel releases for a few years now, with full write permissions to the stable kernel trees.

“I also suggested that Microsoft join linux-distros a year or so ago when it became evident that they were becoming a Linux distro, and it is good to see that they are now doing so.”

Microsoft has shifted towards embracing Linux technology and open source principles over the last few years, and increasingly under CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership. This is after its former CEO Steve Ballmer infamously referred to Linux as a “malignant cancer” and “communism” almost 20 years ago.

A significant change happened a decade ago when Microsoft released 20,000 lines of code to the Linux open source community. This led the executive director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin to declare at the time that “hell has frozen over”.

To demonstrate how much Linux popularity has surged in recent years, Sasha Levin added in a further message to the email chain that the usage of this technology on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services has now surpassed Windows. This is just two years after Microsoft said that 40% of virtual machines in Azure are running Linux.

As a result of this increased usage, Microsoft’s security centre has started receiving a higher volume of security reports of issues with Linux code from users and from vendors.