What is Cloudflare? Why did the Cloudflare outage take down nearly half the world's internet?

Some parts of the web appear to be down due to technical issues at Cloudflare.

 

1. ChatGPT is down globally

What is Cloudflare that paralyzes the internet when it goes down?

Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure that powers many of the core technologies that power today's online experiences. This includes tools that protect websites from cyberattacks and ensure they stay online even during heavy traffic.

The company says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.

The range of sites affected was illustrated by the fact that Downdetector itself – a site many people turn to when websites stop loading or appear to be having problems – also displayed an error message when many people tried to access the site on Tuesday.

Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said the outage "represents a serious disruption to Cloudflare's infrastructure" .

"It's worth noting that much of the internet has had to hide behind Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid denial-of-service attacks in recent years ," he told the BBC - highlighting how the company aims to protect websites from malicious attempts to overwhelm them with traffic requests.

But because of this – and the convenience of the services – it has also become 'one of the internet's biggest single points of failure,' he said .

 

Cloudflare stressed that the outage was due to a technical error. 'To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or malicious activity ,' the company said in a statement. The company's share price fell about 3% shortly after 15:00 GMT.

The issues affecting Cloudflare's service follow an outage that affected Amazon Web Services last month, causing more than 1,000 websites and applications to go offline. Another major web service provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected shortly afterward.

'The outages we've seen over the past few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these vulnerable networks,' said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.

'Companies are often forced to rely heavily on providers like Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon to host their websites and services, because there aren't many other options.'

Cloudflare Outage Sends X, ChatGPT, and More Sites to Massive Outages

Visitors to sites like X, formerly known as Twitter, ChatGPT, and movie review site Letterboxd saw error messages saying a Cloudflare issue was preventing the page from displaying.

Thousands of users began reporting problems with these sites, as well as other services, to outage tracking website Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.

Cloudflare said the "large-scale outage" occurred after a configuration file designed to handle unusual traffic failed to work as expected and "caused issues" in the traffic-handling software for its broader services.

"We apologize to our customers and the internet at large for the disappointment we caused you today ," the company said in a statement.

'Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable,' the company added.

The company said that while the issue has been resolved, some services may still experience errors when they return.

 

Many apps and websites have been affected by the outage. Users reported experiencing delays or technical issues when trying to access services like Grindr, Zoom, and Canva.

Meanwhile, social media platform X (formerly Twitter) displayed a notice on its homepage to some users, informing them that its internal server was experiencing problems due to an 'error' originating from Cloudflare.

ChatGPT's website also shows an error message to some users: "Please unblock requests on cloudflare.com to continue" .

"Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue that potentially impacted multiple customers ," the company said in a new update. "More details will be provided as more information becomes available."

The outage tracking website Down Detector was also affected by the technical issues, but when it loaded, the number of problems spiked.

Affected users saw a message saying there was an "internal server error on Cloudflare's network" and users were asked to "please try again in a few minutes."