Global infrastructure provider Cloudflare is down, for the second time in weeks, taking with it large swathes of the internet.
The issue is emerging as I write, with users complaining on social media site X that they can’t access various tools and websites.
I went on DownDetector to check Cloudflare’s status, but was unable to access the site—presumably because it uses Cloudflare. An error message is displayed, reading “500 Internal Server Error.”
It seems like Reddit users are doing the same. One post reads: “When the down detectors aren’t even working you know you’re screwed.”
Cloudflare Confirms Issues
Cloudflare has confirmed issues on its status page, saying it is “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs.”
“Customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed,” the update reads.
Minutes later, Cloudflare said it has implemented a fix. This means things should be getting back up and running again. At 04:30 a.m. EST, some sites are accessible again.
The Cloudflare issues coincided with planned maintenance, but it is unclear what is causing so many websites to be affected. DownDetector — which is now available again — shows a massive spike in reports relating to Cloudflare, with around 2,000 reports at 04:00 a.m.
At 04:40 a.m Cloudflare also says it is “investigating an increased level of errors for customers running Workers scripts.
“Cloudflare is investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace,” Cloudflare wrote in an update. It said it is “working to analyse and mitigate this problem.”
Cloudflare sent me a statement over email which reads: “A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare’s network.”
“This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components,” the spokesperson said, adding that Cloudflare will “share full details in a blog post today.”
The Cloudflare problems come after an outage on Nov. 18 left large parts of the internet not working due to technical issues. Websites including ChatGPT, X and Zoom were among those affected by the last outage.
It also comes weeks after an outage at Amazon Web Services left multiple websites unusable for hours.
Cloudflare Outage Demonstrates Internet Reliance
Experts say the new Cloudflare outage demonstrates how reliant the internet is on a small subset of providers.
“As the internet has grown more complex, a handful of infrastructure providers end up holding unexpectedly large power over its functioning,” says Richard Ford, CTO at cybersecurity firm Integrity360.
Cloudflare “sits at the heart of that, providing CDN, proxying, routing, DNS and caching so that websites can stay fast, secure and resilient under load,” Ford says.
“When a provider like this fails, whether due to internal error, configuration change or external attack, the ripple effects hit far more than just a few sites.”
It seems that the Cloudflare issues are being addressed, so hopefully the outage is no where near what we saw in November.
I will update this story when more information is available.
