Massive Cloudflare outage takes out websites worldwide
Websites and online services around the world have been hit by a major outage at DNS provider Cloudflare.
Platforms affected include Amazon Web Services, Spotify, X, Facebook, and OpenAI, with thousands of users reporting issues after 11:00am on Tuesday 18 November.
Error messages provided by these services linked to the outage to a common issue at Cloudflare, which acknowledged the issue shortly after reports began to flood in.
In an update on its status portal, Cloudflare quickly acknowledged widespread global issues and said it was investigating the problem.
“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted,” the company said in an update just before midday.
“We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate.”
Around 20 minutes later, it said that it was beginning to see services recover, but noted that customers may continue to experience errors as it worked on the problem.
Reports of widespread outages continued, however, and Cloudflare posted twice over the next hour to reiterate that it was investigating the issue.
Just after 1:00pm, Cloudflare said that it had identified the issue and was working on implementing a solution.
At 2:42pm, it said that a fix had been implemented and it believed the incident had been resolved.
Cloudflare provides network and security services for a vast swathe of the internet, helping to secure websites and online applications.
Much of the consumer traffic on the internet is routed through Cloudflare, and this means an outage at the service provider has severe knock-on effects due to many service’s dependence on the platform.
This global outage due to a single service provider failure is a result of the centralisation of internet infrastructure, as was recently also shown by the recent outage at Amazon Web Services in October.
In the case of AWS, an issue at a single data centre resulted in large parts of the internet being inaccessible for hours, including online banking, social media platforms, and more.
