Internet slowly recovers after far-reaching Cloudflare outage

A currently undisclosed issue has crippled Cloudflare’s network and has rendered a large swathe of internet’s most popular sites and services temporily inaccessible today.

Some of the sites and services affected by the Cloudflare outage (Source: Down Detector)

What happened?

Cloudflare is a crucial internet infrastructure provider: it’s a content delivery and protection network that helps websites load quickly and stay protected from malicious traffic.

(Too?) many sites route their traffic through Cloudflare, so when Cloudflare has an issue, large parts of the internet can be affected at once.

Earlier today, users around the world that were trying to access many popular websites and apps reported seeing server errors and occasionally messages such as “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

Cloudflare confirmed that the incident affected its Sites and Services (Access, Bot Management, CDN/Cache, Dashboard, Firewall, Network, WARP, Workers).

Down Detector, a website that tracks when popular online services are experiencing outages or problems based on real-time user reports, shows that X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI (and ChatGPT), AWS, Spotify, League of Legends, Grindr, Visa, and many other sites/services were affected and were (or still are) intermittently inaccessible.

Down Detector was inaccessible as well, for a short time.

Cloudflare’s system status page says that trouble began a little before mid-day (UTC) and that the company has identified the issue and implemented a fix.

“We believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company stated on 2:42 PM UTC, and noted that it’s working on remediating the impact on application services and has restored dashboard services.

“Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues,” Cloudflare added.

The nature of the issue that caused this outage is yet to be revealed.

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