Cloudflare outage cause revealed: This is what happened.
On November 18, 2023, Cloudflare, a pivotal player in global internet infrastructure, confirmed a significant outage that disrupted numerous online services, particularly affecting users on the East Coast of the United States. The outage began at approximately 11:20 UTC and was fully resolved by 14:30 UTC. According to Cloudflare’s statement, the root cause was a crash in a software system responsible for managing internet traffic, triggered by a configuration file that unexpectedly exceeded its size limits. This incident led to widespread access issues for various platforms, including major services like OpenAI, X, and Spotify, highlighting the company’s critical role in maintaining internet functionality.
Cloudflare emphasized that there was no evidence of malicious activity or an external cyberattack contributing to the outage. Instead, the company noted a spike in unusual traffic that coincided with the service disruptions. Although the exact nature of this traffic surge remains unclear, Cloudflare is actively investigating its cause. In their communication, Cloudflare acknowledged the severity of the situation and expressed regret for the inconvenience caused to customers and users worldwide. They reassured the public that they are implementing measures to prevent similar incidents in the future and committed to providing a detailed analysis on their blog shortly. Given Cloudflare’s extensive network, any disruption can have cascading effects across the internet, reinforcing the necessity for resilient infrastructure in an increasingly digital world.
UPDATE Tuesday, Nov. 18, 11:27 a.m. ET:
Cloudflare confirmed
it experienced a “significant outage”
on Tuesday that stemmed from a crash in a software system that handles traffic for a number of its services.
The company wrote in an emailed statement to Mashable that the issue had been fully resolved and added that it did not appear to be an attack or caused by malicious activity.
The statement from Cloudflare read:
“Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.
To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.
We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on
blog.cloudflare.com
. Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”
Issues with Cloudflare
— one of the internet’s major infrastructure providers —
led to massive outages Tuesday
morning as East Coast folks logged on to work. We’re now starting to get answers as to why that happened.
Cloudflare emailed a statement to Mashable, suggesting that unusual, heavy traffic to its services was to blame. The company has not yet stated whether the unusual traffic appears to be of a nefarious nature.
SEE ALSO:
Cloudflare outage list: X, OpenAI, Canva, Spotify, more impacted
Read the statement from Cloudflare:
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to
cloudflarestatus.com
and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to
blog.cloudflare.com
.”
That spike in unusual traffic, it seems, sparked the massive issues on Tuesday. The
list of services experiencing outages was vast
, but appeared to include
heavy hitters
like
OpenAI
,
X
,
Grindr
, and many more. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection would be affected by a Cloudflare outage. User-reported issues on Downdetector
continued to spike
as we neared 10 a.m. ET, indicating the problems persisted. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
“We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact,” read the
most recent update
on Cloudflare’s status page.
Like
the recent AWS outage
, Cloudflare is one of the major pillars of the internet. When it goes down, the downstream effects are serious and vast — as we’re seeing Tuesday.
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