A major outage at Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company, disrupted services on several popular websites on Friday evening, including Bet365, UberEats, and Wikipedia. Thousands of users in the UK and US reported problems on Downdetector, a platform that monitors online service issues.
Users began experiencing issues shortly after 6.30pm GMT. Cloudflare confirmed it was investigating problems with its services and network. Downdetector data showed 5,247 user reports of issues with Bet365 at 6.57pm, and 217 reports of Cloudflare issues at 7.02pm in the UK.
Bet365 acknowledged the disruption on X, stating: 'We’re aware of an issue with our Website/App, and our Technical Team are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience.'
Cloudflare, which provides services to make websites faster and more secure, said around 20 per cent of all websites worldwide use its services. This is not the first time Cloudflare has suffered an outage; previous incidents occurred in December and November.
Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore noted: 'If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable. The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network... it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.'
