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Web services provider Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to several websites and services including OpenAI, Spotify, X, Grindr, Letterboxd and Canva.
Cloudflare is a cloud services and cybersecurity company based in San Francisco, used by about 20% of all websites. According to W3Techs. It is one of the few services, as well Amazon Web Services, Crowd Strike and quickly (all of which have seen major outages in the past few years) You may never have heard of them, but they provide the basic infrastructure of the Internet.
The bulk of the sites and services affected by Tuesday’s outage, which began around 3:30 a.m. PT, appear to have recovered a little over three hours after the Cloudflare outage. By the end of the day, everything was back to normal and Cloudflare published a blog post explaining what went wrong. Here’s what you need to know.
Why is Cloudflare outage?
First and foremost, Cloudflare was careful to stress that the outage was not caused directly or indirectly by a cyberattack. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the company initially suspected it was a “large-scale DDoS attack.” But it turned out that the outage was due to an internal failure in the software.
Prince said a change in one of Cloudflare’s databases created a larger-than-expected feature file that was too large to run the company’s software. This caused the program to fail.
Once Cloudflare identified the issue, they were able to replace the problematic file with a previous version and get most of the traffic flowing normally again by 6:30 AM PT.
“We regret the impact to our customers and the Internet in general,” Prince said. “Given the importance of Cloudflare to the Internet ecosystem, any outage in any of our systems is unacceptable. Having a period of time where our network was unable to route traffic is extremely painful for every member of our team. We know we let you down today.”
What websites and services are affected?
Cloudflare has a wide range of clients across the internet, from websites with household names to smaller services you may not have heard of. Because of its size, when it crashed, it took many of those sites and services with it.
Among those affected by the outage was Downdetector, the place most people go to report problems when services are offline. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Now that it’s back up and running, Downdetector says it received more than 2.1 million reports during the outage. More than 435,000 of them came from the United States, with the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany appearing to be the next hardest-hit countries.
The Cloudflare outage disrupted a range of sites and services. This is just a sample from Downdetector.
Most of the reports relate to Cloudflare, but other affected companies have also received a large number of reports. They include X (320,549 reports), League of Legends (130,260 reports), OpenAI (81,077 reports), Spotify (93,377 reports), and Grindr (25,031 reports).
How did the outage happen?
Cloudflare first acknowledged the outage at 3:48 a.m. PT. The company issued a statement on its system status page saying it was aware of the issue.
“Cloudflare is aware of and is investigating the issue affecting multiple customers: Wide Errors 500, and Cloudflare Dashboard and API failures as well,” it said. “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this issue. More updates will follow soon.”
At 5:09 a.m. PT, the company said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. In the following hours, errors began to decrease and services gradually came back online.
Cloudflare added at 9:14 a.m. PT that most services were back to normal. She added: “A full post-accident investigation and details of the incident will be provided as soon as possible.”
Is the Internet stable and reliable?
Cloudflare’s outage comes just one month later Amazon Web Services has been downcausing chaos across the Internet. The AWS outage affected sites including Reddit, Snapchat, Roblox and Fortnite, leading many to question whether having such huge swaths of the internet rely on a few centralized services is reasonable or safe.
“The Cloudflare outage was not explicitly caused by or related to the AWS or Azure outages last month, but like those failures, it shows the impact of concentration risk,” said Brent Ellis, principal analyst at Forrester. “In this case, a 3-hour and 20-minute power outage could result in direct and indirect losses of $250 million to $300 million when you consider the cost of downtime and the downstream impacts of services like Shopify or Etsy that host stores for tens to hundreds of thousands of businesses.”
The significant outages also highlight concerns about our increasing reliance on AI – particularly the fragility of the infrastructure that AI relies on to operate every day.
“The most dominant platform declined not because of concurrent queries or the launch of a new competitive model, but because of an issue with Cloudflare, the web security and performance provider,” said Sarah Krebs, director of the Technology Policy Institute at Cornell University. “This issue exposes the reality that this multi-billion, even trillion-dollar investment in AI can only be as reliable as less-scrutinized third-party infrastructure.”