Cloudflare Bogs Down Due to ‘Unusual Traffic,’ Renders Major Sites Inaccessible
Outage Comes on the Heels of a Major AWS Incident That Crippled Online Services for Hours
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday night, causing numerous websites to be inaccessible for several hours. The company operates a global network that provides a suite of services to improve the speed and security of websites and applications. According to the company itself, approximately 20% of websites globally use its services in some way.
Jobs search engine Indeed, e-commerce platform Shopify, social media platform X, Artificial Intelligence platform ChatGPT, and Anthropic chatbot Claude were among those affected by the Cloudflare outage. Cybersecurity Asia was also inaccessible for a few hours because of it, along with Asia Online Publishing Group’s other websites, Data & Storage Asia, and Pickleball News Asia.
Unusual Traffic Disrupts Cloudflare
The outage, according to a Cloudflare spokesperson, was caused by an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic that “grew beyond an expected size of entries.” This unexpected event, in turn, triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for several of the company’s services. The “spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson further shared, was observed at around 5:20 a.m. ET.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the spokesperson added. “We apologise to our customers, and the internet in general, for letting you down today.”
Most sites came back online after a few hours after Cloudflare implemented a fix to resolve the problem. However, the company advised some users might still encounter problems accessing the company’s online dashboard.
“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the company announced, while also maintaining that “there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.”
Another Outage Causes Trouble
Cloudflare’s outage comes less than a month after AWS suffered its own disruption that also made numerous online services inaccessible for nearly a full day. For ESET Global Cybersecurity Advisor Jake Moore, these outages are but reminders of how reliant the world has become on services like Cloudflare, and major clouds such as AWS.
“The outages we have witnessed these last few months have once again highlighted the reliance on these fragile networks,” Moore noted. “Companies are often forced to heavily rely on the likes of Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting their websites and services, as there aren’t many other options.”
