Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure company, has resolved a global outage that caused error messages on numerous websites and services for several hours on Tuesday. The company confirmed at 14:57 GMT that a fix had been implemented and services were returning to normal, though some users may still experience issues accessing the Cloudflare dashboard.
The outage began in the early hours of the US morning and during UK business hours, affecting platforms such as Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Canva, Visa, Vodafone, Vinted, Asda, and M&S. Cloudflare first reported the issue at 11:48 GMT and declared it resolved nearly three hours later.
The cause of the outage remains unclear, but Cloudflare had scheduled maintenance for Tuesday at data centres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago. The company temporarily disabled some services for UK users while working on a fix. Experts, including Prof Alan Woodward of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, suggested a cyber-attack was unlikely due to the service's distributed nature.
Cloudflare, which handles approximately one-fifth of global web traffic, provides protection and defensive services to millions of sites. This incident follows a similar outage at Amazon Web Services less than a month ago, highlighting the fragility of internet infrastructure.
