A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Monday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.
Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, suffered an unidentified problem on Tuesday, which meant internet users could not access some customers’ websites.
Neither could some site owners access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and Open AI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.
The outage is ongoing but as of 12.21pm GMT, the company said: “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.”
A further message said: “Update: we are continuing to investigate this issue.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare said: “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.
“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.”
Cloudflare’s engineers had been scheduled to carry out maintenance on Tuesday on datacentres in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Santiago in Chile, but it is not clear if their activities were related to the outage.
Couldflare was described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” by Alan Woodward, professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security. The company says it provides services to “protect your websites, apps, APIs, and AI workloads while accelerating performance”.
Woodward described it as a “gatekeeper” and said its roles include monitoring traffic to sites to defend them against distributed denial of service attacks when malicious actors try to overwhelm sites with requests. It also checks users are human.
The problems at Cloudflare come less than a month after the outage of Amazon Web Services which brought down thousands of sites.
“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,” Woodward said.
While the cause remains unclear, Woodward said it was unlikely to be a cyber-attack as a service so large is unlikely to have a single point of failure.
