Cloudflare Outage Darkens Vast Portions of the Web
A Cloudflare outage Tuesday (Nov. 18) shut down multiple high-profile websites.
The internet infrastructure provider has pointed to a “spike in unusual traffic” as the culprit behind the trouble, per multiple media reports. The outage has impacted a number of artificial intelligence (AI) services, including ChatGPT, as well as social media platform X.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” a company spokesperson told CNBC. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
As of 9:22 a.m. Tuesday, the company’s status page said Cloudflare was “continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”
The CNBC report notes that Cloudflare’s software is used by multiple businesses around the, helping to manage and secure traffic for a 20% of the internet. Its services include cybersecurity protections, such as distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers try to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t operate.
Meanwhile, a report by Coindesk said the outage coincided with problems at several cryptocurrency-related sites, including Toncoin and Abritrum block explorer Arbiscan, with data platform DefiLlama showing intermittent “internal server errors.”
The outage comes a little less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that impacted millions of people and large portions of the internet around the world.
Facebook, Reddit, Robinhood, Venmo, Verizon, Lyft, United Airlines, Ring, Snapchat, The New York Times, Fortnite, Roblox and the McDonald’s app were all along the websites who experienced problems during that event.
Nine days later, Microsoft reported it was dealing with issues that had been causing service degradation on Microsoft 365 productivity apps and Microsoft Azure cloud computing services for users around the world.
Cloudflare in September issued a warning that information shared in its customer support system should be considered compromised.
This came after the company revealed that it was affected by a breach of Salesloft’s Drift that let someone outside Cloudflare access the Salesforce instance it uses for customer support and in-house customer case management.
“Most of this information is customer contact information and basic support case data, but some customer support interactions may reveal information about a customer’s configuration and could contain sensitive information like access tokens,” the post said.
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