On Tuesday morning, a big chunk of the internet went down or was not working properly, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, X, and more due to an outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
Cloudflare said in its status page at around 8 am ET it had identified the issues and was implementing a fix. Less than two hours later, Cloudflare said “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.”
Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer Dane Knecht explained that a latent bug was responsible in an apologetic X post.
“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht wrote, referring to a bug that goes undetected in testing and has not caused a failure.
Knecht also said Cloudflare failed its customers and “the broader internet” with the outage, and promised that the company is already working to make sure “it does not happen again.”
“I know it caused real pain today,” Knecht added, promising a more in-depth breakdown of what happened “in a few hours.”
The company has since noted on its status page that some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare said it’s working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.
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Cloudflare’s massive outage came less than a month after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is another stark reminder that the entire web depends on just a handful of companies. If these giants experience an issue, the whole of the internet start to crumble.
According to an estimate, Cloudflare is used by 20% of all websites on the internet. The company says it has datacenters in 330 cities, and 13,000 networks “directly connect to Cloudflare, including every major ISP, cloud provider, and enterprise.” One of the main services Cloudflare offers customers is protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which are designed to knock websites offline, which makes Tuesday’s outages somewhat ironic.