A major outage at Cloudflare, a US company that protects millions of websites from cyberattacks, caused widespread error messages across the internet on Tuesday. The issue, which began at 11:48 AM London time, prevented users from accessing some of Cloudflare's customer sites and left some site owners unable to view their performance dashboards.
Cloudflare confirmed that a fix was implemented by 2:48 PM and that the incident was resolved. The company attributed the outage to a configuration file that automatically manages threat traffic, which grew beyond its expected size and triggered a crash in the software system handling traffic for several services. Cloudflare stated there was no evidence of an attack or malicious activity.
During the outage, Cloudflare disabled its Warp encryption service in London, causing connection failures for users trying to access the internet via Warp. Affected sites included X and OpenAI, which experienced increased outages at the same time, according to Downdetector.
Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as 'the biggest company you've never heard of' and a 'gatekeeper' that monitors traffic to defend against distributed denial of service attacks. He noted that the incident highlights the internet's reliance on a small number of infrastructure companies.
Cloudflare apologised to customers and 'the internet in general for letting you down today', promising to learn from the incident. The outage comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered an outage that brought down thousands of sites.
