"I panicked, what happened?" Cloudflare outage causes global internet chaos

On Tuesday morning Eastern Time, internet infrastructure service provider Cloudflare announced that its global network was experiencing anomalies, leading to access failures such as "internal server error" on numerous websites, including the social media platform X. Users were unable to access many websites and services, including retail, e-commerce, social media, financial services, and transportation-related platforms. The company later claimed that the issue was resolved in less than four hours.

During the downtime, some functions of X were interrupted, and many websites faced access issues. According to data from the outage tracking platform Downdetector, in addition to X, a large number of sites were affected, with related reports continuously rising. Users encountered Cloudflare-related error messages when accessing websites such as X, ChatGPT, DoorDash, IKEA, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of New York City.

Subsequently, a female spokesperson for Cloudflare stated that around 6:20 AM Eastern Time, there was an abnormal surge in traffic for one of their services, causing errors in the traffic passing through the company's network.

Another spokesperson for Cloudflare, Jackie Dutton, said in a statement that the issue was caused by an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic, and the fix took less than four hours. The company stated that core remediation measures had been deployed but cautiously pointed out that the system "still needs time to fully stabilize."

Dutton stated:

"The number of entries in this file exceeded the expected size, triggering a software system crash responsible for handling part of Cloudflare's service traffic."

The statement indicated that there was no evidence linking this incident to a cyberattack or malicious activity.

The impact of the outage was extensive. Downdetector reported on its platform that during the Cloudflare outage, "reports of affected services exceeded 2.1 million," indicating that this incident has become one of the more severe infrastructure-level disruptions in recent years.

After the incident, Cloudflare's stock price initially plummeted by 7% at the opening on Tuesday, but the decline later narrowed

The digital asset industry has also reacted. Binance co-founder and former CEO Zhao Changpeng posted on X, stating, "Blockchain kept working," implying that decentralized systems were not affected by this incident.

As of 12:15 PM Eastern Time, Cloudflare stated that the system is gradually recovering, but access errors, performance degradation, or login issues may still occur in some global regions. The company will continue to update the repair progress on the status page.

Over-reliance on a Few Companies

In recent years, multiple issues with digital infrastructure providers have led to global internet usage paralysis. Amazon Web Services (AWS), CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., and Microsoft have all experienced similar incidents, highlighting the internet's heavy reliance on a few companies for services.

Cloudflare and AWS services are almost "invisible" to ordinary users, but their tools support a vast number of websites and services that consumers use daily.

Last month, an AWS outage caused parts of the internet to become paralyzed, rendering millions of users' websites and applications unusable, hindering retail sales, disrupting social media and financial services, and affecting many businesses. Last year, a vulnerability in a tool used by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike led to widespread crashes of computer systems globally, causing thousands of flight delays and cancellations, and disrupting operations for government agencies and large enterprises.

Graeme Stewart, an expert from California cybersecurity company Check Point Software, stated that such incidents highlight the internet's over-reliance on a few infrastructure providers.

He said:

"Many organizations still rely on the same path for all critical services without any truly effective backups. Once that path encounters issues, there are no backup plans. This is the problem we have been seeing."

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, stated that Tuesday's failure once again illustrates the internet's heavy reliance on "a few players." He described Cloudflare as "the largest company you've never heard of."

"People have no choice but to rely on these few large companies."

CTO Apologizes

Cloudflare's Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht apologized for the incident. He wrote on X:

"When the Cloudflare network has issues that affect the massive traffic relying on us, we have let down our customers and the entire internet." This issue itself, the impact it caused, and the time taken to resolve it are all unacceptable. We have begun to ensure that similar situations do not occur again, but I know that today has indeed caused trouble for everyone. Customer trust is of utmost importance to us, and we will do everything we can to regain that trust."

Cloudflare has experienced similar outages multiple times in recent years.

In July 2019, a bug in Cloudflare's software caused some network modules to excessively consume computing resources, taking thousands of websites that rely on Cloudflare (including Discord, Shopify, SoundCloud, and Coinbase) offline for up to 30 minutes. In June 2022, Cloudflare experienced a failure that affected traffic to its 19 data centers, causing multiple major websites and services to go down for about an hour and a half.

Cloudflare's software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide as a buffer layer between enterprise websites and end users, protecting websites from traffic attacks or outages caused by traffic spikes.

Last year, a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused millions of devices running Microsoft Windows to crash, resulting in widespread chaos across various industries, including aviation, banking, and healthcare.

The outage from CrowdStrike stemmed from a bug running at the lowest level of its product on customer computers. Cloudflare's role is to protect internet infrastructure, such as websites and platforms, so when Cloudflare goes down, many popular websites become directly inaccessible or experience anomalies. Cloudflare is primarily responsible for "keeping websites online and fast," while CrowdStrike focuses on protecting computers and servers from attacks