On Tuesday morning, much of the Internet stopped working or was not working properly, including ChatGPT, Claude, Spotify, X and others, due to an outage by internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.
Cloudflare – we read on the status page around 8:00 a.m. EST identified issues and was implementing a solution. Less than two hours later, Cloudflare said, “a fix has been deployed and we believe the incident has now been resolved. We continue to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
Around the same time, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, explained that it was due to a hidden bug in X’s apologetic post.
“In short, a hidden bug in the service that underpins our bot mitigation ability began to crash after we made a routine configuration change. This caused widespread degradation of our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht wrote, referring to the bug that was not detected during testing and did not cause the outage.
Knecht also said Cloudflare had failed its customers and the “broader internet” over the outage, and promised the company was already working to ensure “this doesn’t happen again.”
“I know this caused real pain today,” Knecht added, promising a more detailed account of what happened “over the course of several hours.”
The company has since noted on its status page that some customers may continue to have issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare said it is working to resolve this issue and continues to monitor any further issues.
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Cloudflare’s massive outage comes less than a month after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is another stark reminder that the entire web depends on just a few companies. If these giants experience a problem, the entire Internet will begin to fall apart.
According to estimatesCloudflare is used by 20% of all websites. The company claims has data centers in 330 cities, and 13,000 networks “connect directly to Cloudflare, including all major ISPs, cloud service providers and enterprises.” One of the main services offered to Cloudflare customers is protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to take websites offline, which makes Tuesday’s outages somewhat ironic.