Web services provider Cloudflare got hit by an outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to many websites and services including OpenAI, Spotify, X, Grindr, Letterboxd and Canva.
Cloudflare is a cloud services and cybersecurity company based in San Francisco that is used by approximately 20% of all websites, according to W3Techs. It's one of a handful of services, along with Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and Fastly (all of which have experienced major outages in the past few years) that you might never have heard of, but that provide essential internet infrastructure.
The bulk of sites and services impacted by Tuesday's outage, which began around 3.30 a.m. PT, seemed to recover within three hours of Cloudflare going down. It's likely that some continue to be affected, and may still experience difficulties throughout the day. At the time of writing, Cloudflare was still issuing updates about the incident to its system status page.
Cloudflare hasn't yet said what caused the outage, but has promised to conduct a full investigation.
Which sites and services were impacted?
Cloudflare has a massive range of clients across the internet, ranging from websites that are household names to smaller services you might not have heard of. Due to its size, when it went down, it took many of those sites and services with it.
Among those affected by the outage was Downdetector, which is where most people go to report problems when services are offline. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Now that it's back up and running, Downdetector says that it received over 2.1 million reports during the outage period. Over 435,000 of these came from the US, with the UK, Japan and Germany appearing to be the countries that were next most affected.
The Cloudflare outage took down a range of sites and services. This is just a sampling from the Downdetector site. Downdetector/Screenshot by CNET
Most of the reports pertained to Cloudflare, but other affected companies also received a significant number of reports. They include X (320,549 reports), League of Legends (130,260 reports), OpenAI (81,077 reports), Spotify (93,377 reports) and Grindr (25,031 reports).
... continue reading