A recap of the Cloudflare outages
Key sites around the world went down, some for a few hours, after a widely relied-upon Internet infrastructure company suffered an unknown issue
The outages took place in the early hours of US morning and during UK business hours
It affected users of everything from Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Canva to retail websites of Visa, Vodafone and Vinted and UK grocery chains Asda and M&S.
Cloudflare said at 11:48 GMT that it was investigating and working on a fix. It declared the incident resolved nearly three hours later.
It’s still unknown what exactly the problem was but there had been scheduled maintenance for Tuesday.
The US company provides protection and defensive services to millions of sites, and claims to handle a fifth of web traffic.
Cloudflare said it had to temporarily disable some services for UK users in its attempts to fix the issue today.
Its latest update at 14:57 GMT read:“Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.
We’ll leave the blog there for now. For a full recount of the issue, read our UK technology editor’s report:
Updated
'Incident now resolved' says Cloudflare
The firm has just issued an update saying it believes the incident over.
A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.
I’ve just quickly tested several key sites which are loading again.
Updated
Maintenance had been scheduled today
The company’s engineers had been due to carry out maintenance today at data centres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago, according to the company’s updates.
It’s not clear yet whether their activities were related to the outage.
Unlikely to be a cyber- attack, says expert
Cloudflare was described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” by Prof Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security.
The company says it provides services to “protect your websites, apps, APIs, and AI workloads while accelerating performance”.
Woodward has described it as a “gatekeeper” and says its roles included monitoring traffic to sites to defend them against distributed denial of service attacks when malicious actors try to overwhelm sites with requests. It also checks users are human.
While the cause remains unclear, Woodward said it was unlikely to be a cyber-attack as a service so large was unlikely to have a single point of failure.
The problems at Cloudflare come less than a month after an outage of Amazon Web Services brought down thousands of sites.
“We’re seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet, so that when one of them fails it becomes really obvious quickly,” Woodward said.
Cloudflare slowly recovering but some key platforms still down
Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, has deployed a fix and is slowly recovering service. But there are still key platforms down, such as ChatGPT.
“We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers,” says the firm in its latest update at 13:58 GMT.
Less than an hour ago, the firm said it had made changes that meant error levels for its Cloudflare and Warp encryption service had returned to pre-incident rates.
“We have re-enabled WARP access in London,” Cloudflare said.
Updated
Several major sites and platforms have been affected by the issue including X, Spotify and ChatGPT.
Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and the sites for Ikea, Uber, Visa and Vodafone have also suffered outages, according to Downdetector.
Updated
Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet
A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.
Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem on Tuesday, which meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.
Some site owners could not access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.
The outage is ongoing but as of 12.21pm GMT, the company said: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
A further message said: “Update: we are continuing to investigate this issue.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.
“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.”
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