Cloudflare confirmed in its initial update that it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”, though it did not share a cause or a timeline for a fix.
New Delhi: A worldwide outage at the network of cybersecurity firm Cloudflare Inc. has been resolved after several hours of disruption on Tuesday.
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors. The issue was fixed within six hours, according to the company.
The cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic, Jackie Dutton, a Cloudflare spokesperson said in a statement. There was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity, the statement said.
“The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services,” said Dutton.
The company has experienced several outages over the past few years.
Thousands of users of X, the Elon Musk-owned microblogging platform, faced service disruption across India and globally on Tuesday, along with other websites which rely on Cloudflare’s internet infrastructure to stay online.
Around 5:20 pm, over ten thousand users reported the outage, demonstrating the extent of the disruption, according to Down Detector, which monitors downtime on well-known platforms. Users are facing issues related to feed, website, log in and server connection issues account for the majority of the issues.
Cloudflare confirmed in its initial update that it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”, though it did not share a cause or a timeline for a fix.
Some pages loaded on refresh, but most users continued to see an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”, asking them to try again later.
The outage tracking portal Down Detector also struggled to load because it also relies on Cloudflare.
Earlier in May this year, the social media platform suffered an outage globally, including in India, as users were unable to load new posts and were unable to log in.
According to Downdetector, thousands of users struggled to access X’s webpages, as well as had issues with the app and login page.
While 41 per cent of users said they were unable to log in, the same number of users reported problems with the X app and 18 per cent with the website. The company had yet to reveal the reason behind the outage — the second within 24 hours.
Several users in India tried to use the website but were unable to access it. According to Downdetector, more than 5,000 users worldwide reported issues with the microblogging platform.
In July 2019, a bug in Cloudflare’s software caused one part of its network to suck up computing resources, leading thousands of websites including that of Discord, Shopify Inc., SoundCloud and Coinbase around the world to go offline for as long as 30 minutes. In June 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of its data centers, also essentially shutting down major websites and services in an incident that lasted about an hour and a half.
Cloudflare’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a buffer between their websites and end users and working to protect their sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic.
Last year, a faulty software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. crashed millions of devices operating on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows systems, disrupting a wide range of industries, including air travel, banks and health care.
CrowdStrike’s outage was the result of an error in a product that operates at the deepest levels of customers’ computers. By contrast, Cloudflare protects internet infrastructure such as websites and platforms, which is why many popular websites go down or are unreliable during Cloudflare outages. Cloudflare largely focuses on keeping websites online and fast, while CrowdStrike focuses on keeping computers and servers safe from attacks.
The down time Tuesday is the latest example of the internet’s reliance on “relatively few players,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at University of Surrey, said, while describing Cloudflare as the “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.”
The website for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees US electricity markets, utilities, power traders and other energy-related matters, was also down. A host of companies, attorneys and regulators depend on the site to access regulatory cases and filings.
The websites of global food and agricultural giants including Cargill Inc. and Louis Dreyfus Co. were also down in the New York morning due to the Cloudflare outage.
“People have no choice but to depend on relatively few big names,” said Woodward.
IANS