Yesterday internet service company Cloudflare experienced an outage, leaving sites like X and ChatGPT as well as ASDA and Cineworld unusable.
Cloudflare provides cybersecurity and domain registration for websites across the world, and the outage left users unable to access specific websites.
CEO Matthew Prince issued an explanation for the outage on the Cloudflare Blog after the issue was resolved, which was uploaded to the company’s official website: “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system”.
On a more local scale, Central Scotland news outlet Deadline News was down, leaving locals unable to access a number of stories across Scotland’s central belt.
This is the second Cloudflare outage this year, with a smaller outage occurring in March. It also follows the outage of cloud service Amazon Web Services (AWS) which occurred last month, which similarly impacted the internet by causing shutdowns to websites like Reddit, Snapchat and multiple Amazon services.
Daniel works in application management at a major golfing company that provides services for events such as The Open. He stated: “We still use it [Cloudflare] for some parts of our set-up but we can’t completely rely on it because Cloudflare’s recent track record includes a few major global outages. We can’t really risk that when we have millions of people watching events”
Daniel spoke on how the company uses AWS instead, citing the reason as: “If AWS goes down the whole system doesn’t go down.”
The Cloudflare CEO issued a full apology today alongside the explanation on the Cloudflare Blog:
“An outage like today is unacceptable. We’ve architected our systems to be highly resilient to failure to ensure traffic will always continue to flow. When we’ve had outages in the past it’s always led to us building new, more resilient systems.”
Adding, “on behalf of the entire team at Cloudflare, I would like to apologize for the pain we caused the Internet today.”
The outage lasted from 11:20 until 17:06, with all services returning to normal since.
