Cloudflare service resumes after outage disrupts service for X, ChatGPT, and other sites
The company’s web security tools are invisible to users, but underpin many widely trafficked sites.
An outage that knocked swathes of the internet offline was resolved Tuesday, after downing social-media sites, disrupting retail sales and stalling transportation networks.
Users visiting sites including X, ChatGPT, DoorDash, Ikea and New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority were met with error messages relating to Cloudflare a cloud provider used by major companies for security tools that protect from cyberattacks and traffic surges.
A spokeswoman for Cloudflare said an unusual rise in traffic to one of its services at around 10:30pm AEDT caused traffic passing through the company’s network to experience errors. The bug was fully resolved by 1:30am. Wednesday, she said in an update.
For several hours Tuesday users were unable to access sites and services from retail and social media to financial services, transport and e-commerce.
Shares of Cloudflare were trading down on Tuesday after the incident.
The outage echoes problems experienced by Amazon Web Services last month, but so far on a smaller scale.
Cloudflare and AWS services are effectively invisible to users but their tools underpin many of the sites and services that consumers use every day.
Last month’s AWS outage knocked out parts of the internet, taking down sites and apps for millions of users, disrupting retail sales, social-media services, financial services and other companies. Last year, a bug in a tool used by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike up-ended computer systems across the world, leading to thousands of flight delays and cancellations and snarling operations at government agencies and major companies.
Such outages highlight the internet’s overreliance on a relatively small number of infrastructure providers, said Graeme Stewart, a cybersecurity expert at the California-based company Check Point Software.
“Many organisations still run everything through one route with no meaningful backup,” Stewart said. “When that route fails, there is no fallback. That is the weakness we keep seeing play out.”
Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht apologised for the outage. “We failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” he wrote in a post on X. “That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again.”
Wall Street Journal
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout