Parts of the Internet stopped working on Tuesday evening amid a technical problem at Cloudflare, a company that helps websites secure and manage their Internet traffic.
Access to services like X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, music streaming service Spotify and the popular online game League of Legends was restricted, and in some cases, users were met with the error “try again in a few minutes”. The outage even bricked Downdetector, a site that can normally tell you which other websites are down.
There have been reports of widespread 500 errors (which indicates that your website’s server cannot execute a specific request) as well as the Cloudflare Dashboard and API failing. In 2023, the company said nearly 20 per cent of all websites are protected by Cloudflare’s global network.
Engineers of the Internet infrastructure firm were scheduled to carry out maintenance on Tuesday on data centres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago in
Chile, but it is not clear if their activities were related to the outage.
Access to some websites was being restored on Tuesday night.
The company is one of the many web infrastructure providers that allow websites to serve their pages to users. The outage comes almost a month after Amazon Web Services experienced problems with its service, disrupting a wide range of online services for hours.
In July 2024, a faulty software upgrade by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike brought about a widespread outage that temporarily halted flights, impacted financial services and pushed hospitals to delay procedures.
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company posted in a status update.
It was followed by another message: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
This is not the first time Cloudflare’s system has faced an outage. In July 2019, a bug in its software caused one part of its network to suck up computing resources from the rest of the company, pulling down thousands of websites.
In June 2022, the service suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of its data centres, once again shutting down several major websites and services. The incident lasted for about an hour and a half.
In a notice, New Jersey Transit said both its website and its mobile app were affected by the Cloudflare outage. Credit rating website Moody’s was also affected, displaying a “server error” at the top. Shares in Cloudflare, which went public in 2019 and has a market value of $71-billion, were down 3.5 per cent in pre-market trading.
Cloudflare said a “spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services” caused “traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors”. “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic,” the company said.
Alan Woodward, professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, has described Cloudflare as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.
