Parts of the web appear to have stopped working amid a technical problem at Cloudflare.
Visitors to websites such as X, formerly known as Twitter, and film reviewing site Letterboxd saw an error message that indicated that Cloudflare problems meant that the page could not show.
Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure that offers many of the core technologies that power today’s online experiences. That includes tools that protect websites from cyber attacks and ensure that they stay online amid heavy traffic, for instance.
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a new update. “Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
Tracking website Down Detector, which monitors outage, was also hit by the technical problems itself. But when it loaded it showed a dramatic spike in problems.
Affected users saw a message indicating there was an “internal server error on Cloudflare’s network”. It asked users to “please try again in a few minutes”.
The problems began around 11.30am UK time, though at that time some websites appeared to be loading when they were refreshed. Cloudflare posted an update acknowledging the issue around 15 minutes later.
Another 15 minutes later, the company posted an update saying that it was “continuing to investigate this issue” but giving no indication that it was aware of the cause of a problem or a way to fix it.
Cloudflare provides its internet infrastructure services to companies across the world, usually doing so in a way that is invisible to users. As such, a wide array of apparently unconnected websites were taken down in the outage, just as with a similar technical issue at Amazon Web Services or AWS last month.
