Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month. The problem lasted half an hour and was not an attack, the web infrastructure provider said.
“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” Cloudflare said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures. The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week.
The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, was resolved shortly after 9am GMT. This follows a far larger Cloudflare outage in mid-November that hit sites such as X, OpenAI and Spotify as well as multiplayer games such as League of Legends. That was caused by a configuration file growing beyond its expected size and triggering a crash.
Friday’s error appeared far more minor, affecting sites including Canva, Shopify, the Indian-based stockbroker Groww, as well as LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector. The Downdetector website recorded more than 4,500 reports related to Cloudflare after returning online.
Experts said the outages could prompt companies to reflect on how they use Cloudflare’s services. Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at University College London, said: “I think people will start asking questions now that there have been these two outages in a short period of time.” Michał Woźniak, a DNS and internet infrastructure expert, said: “This again shows how brittle is the big tech internet.”
