The Usual Suspects: Cloudflare Outage Briefly Breaks the Internet *Again*

Cloudflare experienced a brief outage on Friday that impacted numerous global websites, causing them to go offline temporarily. The outage comes less than three weeks after Cloudflare brought a significant portion of the internet to its knees with a long outage.

CNBC reports that earlier today, a significant number of websites worldwide went down due to an issue with Cloudflare, the massive infrastructure provider. The outage affected a wide range of sites, including professional networking platform LinkedIn, digital currency exchange Coinbase, online publishing platform Substack, e-commerce platform Shopify, banking giant HSBC, and food delivery group Deliveroo, among others.

Outage monitoring site Downdetector, which was also briefly impacted by the issue, reported a sharp increase in user complaints about website inaccessibility in the pre-dawn hours for the East Coast. The spike in reports coincided with the Cloudflare outage, highlighting the widespread nature of the problem.

Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the issue and announced that it was investigating the cause of the outage. The company’s shares fell as much as 4.5 percent in premarket trading following the news of the widespread website downtime, but just minutes after the initial announcement, Cloudflare issued an update stating that it had “implemented a fix” and was monitoring the results. This swift response helped mitigate the impact of the outage, and many affected websites began to come back online shortly thereafter. Following the implementation of the fix, Cloudflare’s shares pared some of their losses and were trading down less than two percent in morning trading.

This recent outage comes less than three weeks after a Cloudflare outage brought much of the internet to its knees:

In a recently published blog post, Cloudflare explained that the service outages were caused by internal programming problems, stating categorically that “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind.”

According to the company, the outage was triggered by an internal change made to database access permissions used by its Bot Management system. This change inadvertently caused the database to generate a “feature configuration” file used be its machine learning models that was double the expected size. When this oversized configuration file propagated across Cloudflare’s global network, it exceeded a hardcoded size limit in the software, causing the bot management module to fail entirely. This cascaded into widespread failures of Cloudflare’s core traffic proxy responsible for routing all customer traffic.

Cloudflare’s software is utilized by a large number of businesses worldwide, helping them manage and secure traffic for approximately 20 percent of the internet. One of the key services provided by Cloudflare is protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which involve malicious actors attempting to overwhelm a website’s system with an excessive number of traffic requests, rendering it unable to function properly. For the second time in three weeks, it was Cloudflare itself taking its clients’ websites down, not malicious attacks.