Major Websites Face Global Outage After Fresh Problems at Cloudflare
A lot of the world woke up Friday morning, and a number of popular Web sites weren’t working. The platforms went dark for a moment, including LinkedIn — as well as Zoom and Shopify and Canva, and even the Down Detector site. This latest big online fracas was the result of a new round of issues at Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure companies on the planet.
It began early in the day. Shortly after 9am UK time Cloudflare posted an update which said that it was “investigating issues with upstream providers,” including the Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs. Speaking in programming language, APIs stand for application programming interfaces. Online tools can be broken when the APIs are out of business.
The issue resulted in a “large number of blank pages” appearing for users, according to Cloudflare. This would have resulted in people who attempted to access their favorite websites being greeted with a blank screen or an error message. Many users believed the webpages themselves had crashed when, in fact, the problems ran deeper. It was connected in part to the systems that keep much of the internet running through Cloudflare.
Some hours later, the company announced that it had rolled out a “potential fix” and was monitoring to see how things went. This offered some hope to the users who were attempting to repeatedly reload their screens. Some websites began coming back online by midmorning, though many services continued to experience disruptions.
Down Detector, a site that monitors reports of website outages was also affected. And ironically, the platform that people check for internet outages was affected by an outage — caused by none other than Cloudflare. But when it came back, the site had more than 4,500 reports tied to Cloudflare. That demonstrated how pervasive the problem was.
Read more: Users from around the world shared their experiences on social media. Many said they were unable to attend important Zoom meetings. Others said they couldn’t gain access to LinkedIn, shop on Shopify or design work on Canva. For businesses, it was far from a mere inconvenience. Some businesses depend upon the platforms to get word out, or sell goods and perform other aspects of their daily operations.
The outage also hit the Indian stockbroker Grow. The company confirmed that it was having technical problems “as a result of a global outage at Cloudflare. This temporarily interrupted customers attempting to check or trade stocks. Later, Grow said that all of its services were restored.
To see why this outage was so disruptive, it helps to understand what Cloudflare does in the first place. Cloudflare provides networking and security services to millions of websites and other Internet applications. It goes a long way to keeping websites fast, secure and stable. Indeed, Cloudflare services are used by around 20% of all websites on the internet. So if something goes wrong at Cloudflare, the ripples are visible everywhere on the internet.
This downtime occurs just weeks after a separate major issue at Cloudflare hindered access to many of the internet’s largest platforms. That attack interrupted X (the former Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify and online games such as League of Legends. For many users, it’s yet another blow to online reliability.
These recurring events have raised questions about how much the internet relies on just a handful of infrastructure companies. Cloudflare in particular has a good reputation for security and relatively trouble-free tech, but even big players get the occasional technical hiccup. The problem is that when they do, millions of lives are upended at one time.
Businesses, workers, students and average internet users alike felt the fallout of the outage. There were some online jokes that the internet had “gone on vacation.” Others indicated their frustration at the fact they couldn’t complete work or attend meetings that had been scheduled. It illustrated how deeply entwined our lives have been with online platforms.
By early afternoon, many of the impacted sites were slowly recovering. Cloudflare said it was still watching all facets of its services to ensure that they were functioning properly. The company has yet to offer full explanation of what caused the problem, but more detailed information is expected soon.
For now, the No. 1 takeaway is straightforward: The outage was not the result of a problem with Zoom or LinkedIn or some other popular website. It was a wider problem that simultaneously ensnared many platforms. And it was all connected to issues at Cloudflare.
As the digital universe expands, incident like this remind us just how fragile online systems are. A single error in the backend can lead to worldwide ramifications. Many say this is a sign that internet infrastructure needs to become even stronger and more ready for the unexpected.
Yet it’s very possible that both companies and millions of customers will continue to trust a wider range of these online service providers, because Cloudflare is among the most popular and respected such companies in the world. But outages like this are bound to move the company to do better and avoid such problems moving forward.
Until now, most services are restored. The world turns, but users will not forget how one company’s tech problem brought much of the internet to a temporary halt.
