Cloudflare’s problems were pointed out by the server DownDetector, which monitors the availability of the most famous web services around the world. The first users started to complain about the unavailability of this global platform, which is used by millions of other sites, shortly after 12 o’clock. Even after 1:30 p.m., the problems were not solved.
In a chain reaction, Cloudflare’s problems affected practically all cooperating Internet servers. These are reported as unavailable to some users. On Tuesday afternoon, for example, the pages of the British news daily Independent, the social network X or the artificial intelligence ChatGPT were not available.
Outages are random. The affected websites work for a while, but then appear as unavailable.
Protects against attacks
Cloudflare is a global Internet service provider. Its main activity is to protect the sites involved in the project from all kinds of cyber attacks – typically DDoS attacks, in which hackers try to overwhelm the site with a large number of requests. She subsequently cannot handle the onslaught and looks unavailable.
The collapse is so huge because Cloudflare is among the most popular services of its kind. More than 7.5 million active websites use the platform – according to company representatives, this figure represents 19.3% of the global Internet.
It is not yet clear what caused Cloudflare’s collapse on Tuesday. However, the Internet platform had scheduled maintenance on some of its servers on Tuesday morning.
“We are aware of the problems and are investigating their cause. We will soon inform you about the next procedure,” Cloudflare representatives said before 1 p.m. Around 1:30 p.m., they informed customers that services are starting to resume, but did not comment on the causes of the problems.
Despite this statement, many users still report problems with the availability of websites.
This is not an isolated case
It may seem unbelievable that a single service is responsible for the collapse of millions of websites. Historically, however, this is not the first time that something similar has happened. The global collapse of hundreds of thousands of Internet services and websites already happened last month, when technical problems disabled the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service.
Tens of thousands of users of various services reported problems at the time — from the game titles Fortnite, Roblox or Clash of Clans to Snapchat, Canva or Signal to the services of state authorities, including the website of the British tax administration HMRC.
According to the BBC server, the outage also affected Ring smart doorbells, which also run on the AWS infrastructure.
