A major outage at Cloudflare, a US-based internet infrastructure company, caused widespread error messages and access issues across websites on Tuesday. The disruption, which began around 11:48 am London time, affected millions of users globally, including in the UK.
Cloudflare provides services such as defending websites against malicious attacks and monitoring traffic. The outage prevented some users from accessing customer websites and site owners from viewing performance dashboards. Sites like X and OpenAI also reported increased outages during the same period, according to Downdetector.
By 2:48 pm, Cloudflare announced that a fix had been implemented and the incident was resolved. The company disabled its Warp encryption service in London during the fix, causing connection failures for local users. A spokesperson apologised to customers and the internet community, stating that lessons would be learned from the incident.
The root cause was identified as a configuration file used to manage threat traffic that grew beyond its expected size, triggering a crash in the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services. The company confirmed there was no evidence of an attack or malicious activity.
Professor Alan Woodward from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as a key gatekeeper of internet infrastructure, noting that the outage highlighted the reliance on a small number of such companies. This incident follows a similar outage at Amazon Web Services less than a month earlier.
