Cloudflare Suffers Another Outage – 17 Days After Previous Issue
A Cloudflare outage took several websites offline today – just 17 days after another notable disruption to services. Cloudflare is used by roughly 19.4% of all websites on the internet, making it one of the world’s largest content delivery networks.
Among the affected sites were, perhaps somewhat ironically, Downdetector – a website which tracks online outages. LinkedIn was also affected, but other social media sites including X and Facebook appeared to have been unaffected. Salesforce Ben was also down for a while – sorry about that! Let’s take a look at what happened.
Cloudflare Outage: What Happened?
On December 5 at 9.33 UTC, Cloudflare posted an update saying it was investigating an “increased level of errors” for customers running Workers scripts.
They wrote: “We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”
Five minutes later, Cloudflare posted an update saying: “Cloudflare is investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.”
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Cloudflare’s update on the status of the problem, posted at 9.33 UTC, December 5 -
Downdetector, accessed 9.30am BST, showing thousands of reports of issues at Cloudflare and a spike in issues reported at a range of websites. -
Downdetector, accessed 9.30am BST, showing thousands of reports of issues at Cloudflare and a spike in issues reported at a range of websites.
Once Downdetector was back online, the extent of the issue was revealed, with Shopify, Zoom, Vinted, Fortnite, Square, Just Eat, Canva, Vimeo, AWS, and Deliveroo all seeing a spike in reports of issues.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told Salesforce Ben: “A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare’s network at approximately 8:47 GMT and concluded approximately 9:13 GMT. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share full details in a blog post today.”
Previous Cloudflare Outage
Last month, on November 18, a Cloudflare outage affected ChatGPT, X, AWS, Spotify, Letterboxd, and others due to a “latent bug”.
Following the incident in November, chief technology officer Dane Knecht wrote on X: “Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us.
“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made.”
The company had said during the previous incident that there had been “a spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services.
Summary
A Cloudflare outage took several websites offline today, and the company says it is investigating an “increased level of errors” for customers running Workers scripts.
It comes just one month after a previous outage caused disruption.
This is a breaking news story and is being updated. Check back later for more information.
