On Friday morning, Cloudflare experienced a significant outage that affected access to numerous global websites, including LinkedIn and Zoom. The internet infrastructure provider announced later that day it had successfully restored services following the disruption, which lasted several minutes. This incident represents the second outage for the company in less than three weeks.
Cloudflare clarified that the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack. The company stated, “a change to how its firewall handles requests caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning.” As investigations continue, they are focusing on related issues affecting the Cloudflare Dashboard and its application programming interfaces (APIs).
Expert Insights on Outage Causes
Cybersecurity professionals emphasize the challenges in identifying the root causes of such outages. According to Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, this particular incident may have originated from “a database change they had made as part of planned maintenance that just went slightly awry,” leading to an overload of the systems.
The outage prompted a brief shutdown at Edinburgh Airport, which later stated that the issue was localized and not connected to Cloudflare. This incident adds to a series of recent outages affecting major tech services. In November, a three-hour disruption impacted users of various platforms, including ChatGPT, the online game League of Legends, and the New Jersey Transit system.
In a related incident last month, Microsoft experienced an outage with its Azure cloud portal, which prevented access to services such as Office 365 and Minecraft. The company attributed this disruption to a configuration change within its Azure infrastructure.
Increasing Frequency of Outages
The trend of outages within major tech platforms raises concerns about the reliability of widely used services. Ford noted, “This is one of the things that we are going to see more and more. We are seeing the frequency increase as organisations put more eggs in fewer baskets, and as the complexity and the size and scale of operations like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare grow.”
In October, Amazon also faced a substantial outage of its cloud computing services, highlighting the vulnerability of these systems as they expand. As reliance on cloud providers increases, the potential for widespread service disruptions becomes a pressing concern for both businesses and consumers alike.
As Cloudflare works to enhance its systems and prevent future outages, the focus remains on ensuring the reliability of critical internet services that millions of users depend on daily.
