The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It provides datacentres, website and email security, protection from data loss and defences against cyber threats, among other things. It describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet”, with technology that sits between its clients and the wider world that blocks billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global infrastructure to speed up internet traffic. It makes more than $500m (£440m) a quarter from nearly 300,000 customers operating in 125 countries, including China.
Why does it matter?
It is one of several companies that together form key elements of the nervous system of the internet – and so when its services fail, websites can effectively go offline, affecting millions of people and companies. ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s X social media platform were among the sites that appeared to be affected by Tuesday’s outage. By one estimate, Cloudflare provides services to one in five of the world’s websites.
Who else was affected by the outage?
Users of several heavy-traffic websites reported that they went offline at the same time as the Cloudflare outage. They include the gambling website Bet365, the multiplayer battle game League of Legends and the accounting and payroll company Sage, as well as YouTube and Google, according to Downdetector, a website measuring reports of outages.
What went wrong?
Cloudflare called it an “internal service degradation”. It took just under three hours from announcing it was investigating the problem to declaring a fix had been implemented, and the incident had been resolved at 2.42pm UK time. There may have been a specific link to services in London, as it said that it had to disable an encryption service in the UK capital during its attempts at remediation. It said there had been an unusual spike in traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am but it did not yet know the cause of it.
What does the outage tell us about the health of the internet?
With much of the world’s economy reliant on the internet – from banking to e-commerce – some experts in cyber-resilience warn that its infrastructure has become too reliant on a few big companies, creating a “dependency chain”. The problems at Cloudflare come less than a month after outages at other cloud services operators, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. Together with Google Cloud, these three providers account for about two-thirds of the infrastructure underlying the digital world. Experts argue it shows there should be greater diversity in supply of internet services.
