A global outage at Cloudflare, a US company that provides security and performance services to millions of websites, caused error messages to appear on numerous sites on Tuesday. The problem, which began at around 11:48am London time, left internet users unable to access some of its customers' websites.
Cloudflare said a fix had been implemented by 2:48pm and the incident was resolved, though it warned that some services might be briefly degraded as traffic spikes post-incident. The company disabled its encryption service Warp in London during the outage, affecting users trying to connect via that service.
Prof Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as 'the biggest company you've never heard of' and a 'gatekeeper' for internet traffic. He noted that the incident highlighted how few companies underpin internet infrastructure, making failures quickly noticeable.
Cloudflare attributed the root cause 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. The company stated there was no evidence of an attack or malicious activity.
