Cloudflare chaos: Third internet outage in four weeks triggers global disruptions

If you couldn’t load ChatGPT, scroll through X or even check Downdetector to see why everything was broken on the internet, you weren’t alone.

A massive outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare that started on Tuesday triggered a wave of “500 Internal Server Errors” across the globe, knocking substantial portions of the web offline and once again exposing the fragility of the modern internet.

Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” that takes content from 20 per cent of the world’s websites and mirrors them on thousands of servers worldwide.Credit: iStock

Early on Wednesday morning (AEDT) Cloudflare said its engineers no longer saw some of the issues plaguing its customers, but that they were continuing to monitor for any further problems.

Platforms that experienced outages included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.

The outage was believed to be behind the tech issues that hit Australian airports on Tuesday night, leading to flight delays, but Air Services Australia said the issue was caused by “equipment failure”.

In France, national railway company SNCF’s website has been affected. The company warned customers that “some information and schedules may not be available or up to date. Our teams are working to restore these services as quickly as possible”.

Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up “it results in massive digital gridlock” for internet users, cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple said.

While most people think there’s a direct line between their digital device and a website, Chapple said companies like Cloudflare sit in the middle of those connections.

This latest incident – which follows a similar major Cloudflare outage in June which lasted for two hours and 30 minutes – serves as another stark reminder of the internet’s heavy reliance on a handful of centralised providers. When a single point of failure like Cloudflare stumbles, the impact is immediate and widespread.

Bob Wambach, vice president of portfolio and strategy at Dynatrace, noted that these events reveal just how precarious our digital dependency has become.

The outage is believed to be behind the tech issues that hit Australian airports on Tuesday night.Credit: AP

“The moment a vital service goes down, users find themselves unable to access sites and applications they rely on, demonstrating how quickly disruption spreads when a core layer of internet protection is affected,” Wambach said.

He emphasised that the complexity of modern IT environments often hides these risks until it’s too late.

“Global incidents like this are a clear reminder of how dependent our world has become on software and digital systems operating as expected... As our reliance on technology grows and AI continues to reshape how we operate, maintaining that visibility across complex digital ecosystems will be essential.”

Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” that takes content from 20 per cent of the world’s websites and mirrors them on thousands of servers worldwide, said Chapple, an information technology professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

When a single point of failure like Cloudflare stumbles, the impact is immediate and widespread.

“When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site,” Chapple said. “Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home. That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response. It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20 per cent of the internet goes down at the same time.”

Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.

And Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.

Jake Moore, ESET global cybersecurity advisor, argues that the root of the problem lies in the industry’s reliance on ageing protocols that underpin the web.

“The outages we have witnessed this last few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks,” Moore said. “Companies are often forced to heavily rely on the likes of Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting their websites and services as there aren’t many other options.”

Moore pointed specifically to the Domain Name System (DNS) as a critical choke point. “The technology is based on an outdated, legacy network that redirects words in a web address into computer-friendly numbers. When this system fails, it catastrophically collapses and causes these outages.”

While replacing these legacy systems is nearly impossible in the short term, experts argue that resilience must become a priority. Moore notes that despite the risks, major providers like Cloudflare still offer the best defence against other threats.

“It may sound risky, but the major cloud providers actually have lots of impressive fail-safes in place and usually provide more protection than the lesser well-known cloud providers.”

With AP

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