A major outage at a key piece of internet infrastructure blocked access for tens of thousands of users, with ChatGPT, Spotify and X among the affected sites.
The issue was widespread, with users around the world reporting problems accessing sites handled by Cloudflare.
The company’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a sort of buffer between their websites and end users, working to protect their sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic. It handles around 20 per cent of internet traffic.
The DownDetector monitoring site, which was itself hit by the outage, showed a flurry of reported issues after 11am on Tuesday. More than 10,000 DownDetector users reported issues related to Cloudflare.
Shortly after 1pm, Cloudflare said it had identified the issue and had implemented a fix, allowing some services to get back online.
“We are continuing to work towards restoring other services,” it said.
Thousands of users reported issues with a host of different websites, including the film review site Letterboxd, which were impacted by technical issues at the internet network services business.
A number of the websites affected, including X, came back online temporarily before suffering further problems.
Users saw a message on a number of the websites saying the issues were caused by an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”.
Cloudflare was investigating an issue that “potentially impacts multiple customers,” the San Francisco-based company said on its website.
The same page shows Cloudflare had been experiencing issues with a customer support portal, and had been scheduled to conduct some scheduled maintenance in some areas earlier in the day. At one point, Cloudflare’s own outage status website wasn’t loading.
The latest outage comes only weeks after Amazon and Microsoft were both hit by major disruptions. The service disruptions caused chaos for thousands of companies, with Snapchat, Air New Zealand and Amazon itself among the companies affected.
Cloudflare’s system has also gone down — multiple times — before. In July 2019, a bug in Cloudflare’s software caused one part of its network to suck up computing resources from the rest of the company, leading thousands of websites around the world that rely on Cloudflare to go offline for as long as 30 minutes.
In June 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of its data centres handling a significant proportion of its global traffic, also essentially shutting down several major websites and services. The incident lasted for about an hour and a half. - Bloomberg/PA
