A significant outage at the global internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare caused widespread disruption on Tuesday, rendering a host of high-profile websites inaccessible for approximately three hours.
What is Cloudflare and Why Did It Cause Such Disruption?
Cloudflare is a major cloud services and cybersecurity firm that acts as a critical gateway for a vast portion of the world's web traffic. The company, which boasts nearly 300,000 customers across 125 countries including China, describes its technology as an 'immune system for the internet', blocking billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global network to speed up internet traffic for its clients.
The outage's impact was severe because Cloudflare provides services to an estimated one in five websites globally. When its systems fail, the websites that rely on it effectively vanish from the online world, creating a domino effect that affects millions of users and businesses.
Which Major Services Were Brought Down?
Users of numerous high-traffic websites reported issues coinciding with the Cloudflare problem. According to outage tracking site Downdetector, the list of affected services was extensive and included:
- The popular gambling platform Bet365.
- The multiplayer battle game League of Legends.
- Business software firm Sage.
- Tech giants Google and YouTube.
- Other notable sites like ChatGPT and Elon Musk's X platform.
The incident highlighted the sheer scale of dependence on a single provider's infrastructure.
What Caused the Problem and What Does It Mean for the Internet?
Cloudflare described the event as an 'internal service degradation'. The company began investigating the issue just before midday and took just under three hours to implement a full fix, declaring the incident resolved at 2.42pm.
The problem began with an unusual spike in traffic to one of its services at 11.20am, though the root cause remains unknown. As part of its remediation efforts, Cloudflare had to disable an encryption service specifically in London, suggesting a potential link to its UK operations.
This incident, coming less than a month after outages at other cloud giants Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, raises serious questions about the internet's health. Experts in cyber-resilience warn of a growing 'dependency chain', where too much of the global economy relies on a handful of key providers. With Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud accounting for about two-thirds of the underlying digital infrastructure, this outage underscores the urgent need for greater diversity in the supply of critical internet services to bolster overall stability.
