A global outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet’s core infrastructure providers, caused error messages across multiple websites on Tuesday, leaving many users unable to access services.
Cloudflare, a US based company that protects and accelerates millions of websites, reported an unidentified problem that disrupted traffic on parts of its network. Some site owners were also unable to access their performance dashboards.
Outage tracking services recorded increased problems at the same time on platforms including X and OpenAI, suggesting a broader impact on services that rely on Cloudflare. While most traffic continued to flow, users experienced higher than normal error rates across several Cloudflare services.
By 12.21pm GMT, the company said it was seeing services recover, although customers might still notice elevated error rates while remediation continued.
Failed networks
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company had observed “a spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services from 11.20am, which caused some traffic crossing its network to fail.
“While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services,” the spokesperson said, adding that engineers were “all hands on deck” to restore normal operation before turning to a full investigation of the cause.
As part of its response, Cloudflare temporarily disabled its Warp encryption service in London, warning that users trying to reach the internet via Warp in the capital would see connection failures.
Cloudflare had already scheduled maintenance work on datacentres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago in Chile, although it is not yet clear whether those activities are linked to the incident.
Internet's gatekeeper
Cyber security experts describe Cloudflare as one of the internet’s main “gatekeepers,” monitoring and filtering traffic to defend sites against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and automated bot activity. When such a central provider experiences problems, the effects can ripple quickly across the web.
The incident comes less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage disrupted thousands of sites, underlining how concentrated critical internet infrastructure has become, and how visible any failure now is.
While the exact cause of Cloudflare’s outage remains unknown, experts say a targeted cyber attack is unlikely, as services at this scale are designed to avoid single points of failure.
Source: The Guardian