A global outage at Cloudflare, a US company that protects millions of websites from cyberattacks, caused error messages across the internet on Tuesday. The issue, which began at 11:48am London time, prevented users from accessing some of its customers' websites and left site owners unable to view their performance dashboards.
Downdetector reported simultaneous increased outages at sites including X and OpenAI during the same period. Cloudflare implemented a fix by 2:48pm, stating: 'A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved.' The company apologised to customers and the internet for the disruption, vowing to learn from the incident.
The root cause was identified as an oversized configuration file that crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services. The company disabled its Warp encryption service in London temporarily. A spokesperson confirmed there was no evidence of malicious activity or an attack.
Professor Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as 'the biggest company you've never heard of' and a 'gatekeeper' of internet infrastructure. He noted that the incident highlights the reliance on a small number of companies for internet stability, coming less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage.
