A significant outage at Cloudflare, a crucial but often invisible internet infrastructure company, triggered widespread disruption across global websites on Tuesday.
What happened during the Cloudflare outage?
The US-based firm, which provides security and performance services for millions of websites, experienced an unidentified technical problem. This resulted in users being unable to access numerous customer sites, while some site owners found themselves locked out of their own performance dashboards.
According to data from Downdetector, popular platforms including X and OpenAI experienced increased outages simultaneously with Cloudflare's issues. The company acknowledged the ongoing problem, stating at 12.21pm GMT: "We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts."
The hidden giant of internet infrastructure
Alan Woodward, professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, previously described Cloudflare as "the biggest company you've never heard of." The company acts as a digital gatekeeper, monitoring web traffic to defend against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks where malicious actors attempt to overwhelm sites with requests.
Cloudflare's roles extend to verifying that users are human and accelerating website performance. Their services protect websites, apps, APIs, and increasingly, AI workloads. Notably, this incident occurred less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage that similarly brought down thousands of sites.
Broader implications for internet resilience
Professor Woodward highlighted the concentration of internet infrastructure, noting: "We're seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet, so that when one of them fails it becomes really obvious quickly."
While the exact cause remains under investigation, Woodward suggested a cyber-attack was unlikely, explaining that services of this scale typically don't have single points of failure. Cloudflare engineers had been scheduled to conduct maintenance on data centres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Santiago, Chile, though the relationship between this planned work and the outage remains unclear.
The incident underscores the fragility of our increasingly centralised digital ecosystem and the critical role played by infrastructure providers that typically operate behind the scenes.
