What happened to Cloudflare? Why was it down, how did it cause internet outages - what is its status, is it still down today
A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday 18 November due to problems affecting Cloudflare.
Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT. Cloudflare said the "significant outage" occurred after a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic did not work as intended and "triggered a crash" in its software handling traffic for its wider services.
It said in a statement: "We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable”.
It said while the issue had been resolved, some services might still encounter errors as they came back online. A wide range of apps and websites were impacted by the outage.
Cloudflare provides network and security services for many online businesses in order to help their websites and applications operate. This includes running services such as checking that visitors to websites are humans rather than bots, says around a fifth of all global websites use some of its services.
In an updated notification to their system, the network service said: “Cloudflare services are currently operating normally. We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network. Our engineering teams continue to closely monitor the platform and perform a deeper investigation into the earlier disruption, but no configuration changes are being made at this time.
“At this point, it is considered safe to re-enable any Cloudflare services that were temporarily disabled during the incident. We will provide a final update once our investigation is complete.” According to DownDetector there are no new reports of problems with Cloudflare this morning (Wednesday 19 November).
Cloudflare has stressed the problem was the result of a technical problem. "To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," it said in its statement. The company's share price was trading around 3% lower shortly after 15:00 GMT.