Cloudflare outage easing after impacting thousands of internet users

A global outage at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Nov 18 after preventing thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6.40am Eastern Time (7.40pm Singapore time). It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.

The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon’s cloud service in October caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, were inaccessible owing to the disruption.

Cloudflare – whose shares were down about 5 per cent in premarket trading – runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyber attacks.

The latest outage prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare had, however, come down to about 600 by 8am ET from a peak of nearly 5,000, the outage tracking tool showed.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Since the numbers are based on user-submitted reports, the actual number of affected users may vary.

“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20am UTC (7.20pm Singapore time). That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

X and ChatGPT creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Cloudflare is the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” said Professor Alan Woodward, a cyber-security expert at the University of Surrey, adding that the outage was another example of the internet’s reliance on “relatively few players”.

“People have no choice but to depend on relatively few big names,” he told Bloomberg. REUTERS, BLOOMBERG