Cloudflare Outage Darkens Vast Portions of the Web

Cloudflare has resolved an outage that shut down multiple high-profile websites on Tuesday (Nov. 18).

The internet infrastructure provider said in a 19:28 UTC update on its status page that the incident it dubbed “Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues” has been resolved.

In its previous update posted at 17:44 UTC, Cloudflare said that its services were operating normally and that it was no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network.

“Our engineering teams continue to closely monitor the platform and perform a deeper investigation into the earlier disruption, but no configuration changes are being made at this time,” the company said in that update.

A Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC that the company had identified the “root cause” of the outage and that there was no evidence that it was caused by an attack or malicious activity.

Earlier Tuesday, Cloudflare pointed to a “spike in unusual traffic” as the culprit behind the trouble, per multiple media reports. The outage impacted a number of artificial intelligence (AI) services, including ChatGPT, as well as social media platform X.

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” a company spokesperson told CNBC during the outage. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”

At 9:22 a.m. Tuesday, the company’s status page said Cloudflare was “continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”

The CNBC report noted that Cloudflare’s software is used by multiple businesses around the world, helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the internet. Its services include cybersecurity protections, such as distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers try to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t operate.

Meanwhile, a report by Coindesk said the outage coincided with problems at several cryptocurrency-related sites, including Toncoin and Abritrum block explorer Arbiscan, with data platform DefiLlama showing intermittent “internal server errors.”

The outage came a little less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that impacted millions of people and large portions of the internet around the world.

Facebook, Reddit, Robinhood, Venmo, Verizon, Lyft, United Airlines, Ring, Snapchat, The New York Times, Fortnite, Roblox and the McDonald’s app were all along the websites who experienced problems during that event.

Nine days later, Microsoft reported it was dealing with issues that had been causing service degradation on Microsoft 365 productivity apps and Microsoft Azure cloud computing services for users around the world.

Cloudflare in September issued a warning that information shared in its customer support system should be considered compromised.

This came after the company revealed that it was affected by a breach of Salesloft’s Drift that let someone outside Cloudflare access the Salesforce instance it uses for customer support and in-house customer case management.

“Most of this information is customer contact information and basic support case data, but some customer support interactions may reveal information about a customer’s configuration and could contain sensitive information like access tokens,” the post said.