Cloudflare Massive Outage Was Not The Product of An Attack

Another day, another massive service outage affected the internet. This time, it was the networking company Cloudflare.

Millions of internet users woke up to find their favorite websites, including X, ChatGPT, and even the website-tracking site DownDetector, not working due to a massive outage at Cloudflare, a company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services.

Instead of the standard web page, internet users were greeted by a page telling them, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

Our website was also affected by the outage.

Around 9:42 am, Cloudflare issued an update on its status page claiming, “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Cloudflare’s CTO Says The Outage Was Not The Result of An Attack

With any major service outage lately, many wondered if it was the result of an attack, but Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knect, shut that down in a statement on his X (formerly Twitter) account.

“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” Knecht wrote.

He continued, “A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.”

The Verge reports that the outage affected online services such as Indeed, Grindr, Uber, Canva, Spotify, NJ Transit, League of Legends, and Archive of Our Own. Websites like Axios, Politico, and The Information were also down.

The Cloudflare outage followed the Amazon Web Services outage that brought the internet to a standstill less than a month ago.

You can see more reactions to Cloudflare failing its customers below.