On Tuesday morning, a large portion of the internet was down or not working properly, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, X, and more due to an outage with internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
Cloudflare said on its status page around 8 a.m. ET that it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix. Less than two hours later, Cloudflare said, “We believe the fix has been implemented and the incident is resolved. We continue to monitor the error to ensure all services return to normal.”
Around the same time, Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, explained that a potential bug was the cause in an apology post for X.
“In short, an underlying bug in the service that powers our bot mitigation capabilities started crashing after routine configuration changes we made, which led to a cascading widespread degradation of our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht said, referring to a bug that was not detected in testing and did not cause an outage.
Knecht also said that Cloudflare had caused an inconvenience to its customers and the “broader Internet” with the outage, and promised that the company was already working to “ensure this never happens again.”
“We know today that it caused real pain,” Knecht added, promising to provide more details on what happened “in the next few hours.”
The company later noted on its status page that some customers may still be experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare said it is working on a fix to resolve this issue and continues to monitor for further issues.
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Cloudflare’s massive outage comes less than a month after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), a stark reminder of how dependent the entire web is on just a handful of companies. When something goes wrong with these giants, the entire internet begins to fall apart.
According to estimates, Cloudflare is used by 20% of all websites on the Internet. The company says it has data centers in 330 cities and 13,000 networks “including all major ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises” that connect directly to Cloudflare. One of the main services Cloudflare provides its customers is protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at taking websites offline, making Tuesday’s outage somewhat ironic.
