Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is recovering after a major outage that took down sites across the web. Users weren’t able to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking site DownDetector on Tuesday morning, with some sites displaying an error message that said, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
The disruption, which started at around 6:20AM ET, is linked to a “configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton tells The Verge. “The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.” Dutton added that “there is no evidence” of an attack or other malicious activity.
Cloudflare posted an update to its status page at 9:42AM ET, saying: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht wrote in a post on X that the service “failed” its customers and the broader internet, adding that “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made… This was not an attack.”
Other online services, including Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legends, and Archive of Our Own, experienced issues during the outage, while digital outlets like Axios, The Information, and Politico also went down.
The Cloudflare outage comes less than a month after a huge Amazon Web Services crash took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and other services, which was followed by issues at Microsoft Azure that brought Xbox offline for hours.
Update, November 18th: Added an update from Cloudflare.
It’s interesting to see how interconnected our online services are and how a single outage can have such a widespread impact. It’s a reminder of the importance of reliable infrastructure in our digital lives. Thank you for sharing this update!
That’s a great point! It really highlights the reliance many platforms have on a few key infrastructure providers. It makes you wonder how many other services might be affected in future outages, and how companies could diversify their dependencies to mitigate these risks.