Cloudflare outage causes global outage of commonly used websites

A Cloudflare outage has disrupted parts of the internet, affecting many commonly used websites.

“Cloudflare is aware of and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said.  “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

The company also stated that some services are starting to recover, “but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”

The company’s engineers had been scheduled to carry out maintenance On Tuesday in data centres in Los Angeles, Atlanta, among other states, but it is not confirmed if their activities were related to the outage.

Whilst trying to fix the problem, Cloudflare disabled an encryption service called WARP in London, whilst they try to identify the cause of the outage.

The outage has affected Major websites, such as Canva, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Facebook, Spotify, Bet365 and social media platform X, among others, which have been hit with technical issues, including accessibility issues. 

MaltaToday and other news websites in Malta are also experiencing outages. 

More than 10,000 people have reported outages on the social media platform X since the outage started at 12:47pm.

Visitors also wanting to access websites in Malta, including this newspaper’s website, saw an error message from Cloudflare, which is prompted when the page can’t be shown.

Affected users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network.” It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes.”

Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure, offers a major part of the core technologies that power mainstream websites. This also includes tools that protect websites from cyber-attack. 

It says that 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.

Alongside this, tracking website Down Detector, which monitors outages, was also hit by the technical issues.

Last month, Amazon experienced an internet service outage, which also left hundreds of popular websites and apps with accessibility issues. This was caused by a ‘faulty automation’, Amazon said.