Cloudflare down highlights: Issue resolved, firm admits it ‘failed’ customers after big outage

Following a global outage of Cloudflare Inc.'s services, the company's shares fell 1.4 per cent on Wall Street.

A Cloudflare Inc. spokesperson said that the cybersecurity firm observed a "spike in unusual traffic: to one of its services around 6:20 am ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.

The issue was caused by a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic, and the problem took less than four hours to fix, Jackie Dutton, the spokesperson, said in a statement.

“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,” said Dutton.

He added that there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity.

Cloudflare down LIVE: The global firm's chief technology officer Dane Knecht shared more details on the outage and said the impact on traffic was resolved by 14:30 UTC (8 pm IST), but the incident required some additional work to fully restore our control plane, which is used by people for configuration.

Cloudflare down LIVE: From users on X, AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to video game fanatics on "League of Legends", services were hit significantly across platforms after an outage hit Cloudflare on Tuesday.

The outage impacted multiple platforms, including Canva, Spotify, Perplexity and ChatGPT, among others. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht later explained that "a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made."

Cloudflare down LIVE: After suffering a massive outage for hours that even impacted several key platforms like X, ChatGPT and Perplexity, among others, Cloudflare's shared dropped by 2.3 per cent, Bloomberg reported. Cloudflare said there was "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity".

Cloudflare down LIVE: An outage that lasted for hours has finally been resolved as users report that several platforms like ChatGPT, X and Spotify are working normally.

Cloudflare CTO said in a tweet that the issue is resolved, and had earlier said that the firm would ensure that such outage doesn't repeat in future.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Cloudflare is a software and a cloud network used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally. Any issue with the service has always impacted the online platforms that use it. Cloudflare acts as a buffer between websites and their users, helping protect those sites from attacks that could overwhelm them with traffic.

This is why the latent bug that caused a glitch in the software ended up impacting multiple platforms, including Canva, Spotify, Perplexity, X and ChatGPT, among others.

Cloudflare down LIVE: According to Bloomberg, three years after the bug hit the firm's software in 2019, another outage hit 19 Cloudflare data centers in June 2022, disrupting major websites and services worldwide for roughly 90 minutes.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Thousands of websites, including Discord, Shopify, SoundCloud, and Coinbase, were knocked offline for up to 30 minutes back in July 2019 when a bug in Cloudflare’s software caused part of its network to overload.

Cloudflare down LIVE: In response to a question by one of the users on X regarding the big Cloudflare outage, the firm's CTO said: “It is resolved”.

The tweet was made after he acknowledged that the firm “failed our customers and the broader Internet”.

Cloudflare down LIVE: As Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht gave his first reaction after the outage, he also said that more details on the breakdown of what led to the issues will be released in the next few hours.

He also gave a brief description of what led to the problems, saying a latent bug crashed after a routine configuration change was made.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Hours after a massive Cloudflare outage impacted multiple sites and online platforms, the firm's CTO Dane Knecht reacted and also clarified that it was “not an attack”.

“Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back,” he wrote on X.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Amid the massive ongoing outage on Cloudflare, the firm's CTO Dane Knecht has given his first reaction, revealing what may have caused it.

“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services,” a part of his tweet read.

Cloudflare down LIVE: ChatGPT is among the worst hit as a massive outage affects Cloudfare. When users take to the AI platform, they are seeing this message: ‘please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed’.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Users may see some witness disruptions briefly, Cloudfare said in a statement as a massive outage impacts several online platforms. “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate,” the firm said.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Not just AI and social media platforms, gaming titles League of Legends, RuneScape and Valorant were also impacted due to the Cloudflare outage. As per DownDetector, several people were seen reporting issues with the platforms after 7 pm.

Cloudflare down LIVE: With many users across platforms seeing glitches due to the Cloudfare outage, a spokesperson of the company seems to have commented on what caused the issues. “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," a spokesperson was quoted as saying by the Guardian.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Amid the ongoing outage, a spokesperson of the firm told the Guardian that there were some “elevated errors” across some Cloudfare plaforms even as operations ran normally on others.

Cloudflare down LIVE: With the Cloudflare outage persisting, some other prominent platforms like Truth Social, Google, ChatGPT and YouTube are also facing issues, according to DownDetector.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Cloudflare said it had to temporarily disable certain services for United Kingdom users.

“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London,” the company wrote on its status page. “We are continuing to work toward restoring other services.”

Cloudfare down LIVE: Here is the list of websites that are affected by Cloudfare outage:

• X (formerly Twitter)

• ChatGPT

• League of Legends

• Spotify

• Canva

• Perplexity

• Gemini

• Grindr

• LetterboxD

Cloudflare down LIVE: In its latest update, Cloudfare said, “We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”

Notably, the outage has affected several platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Peplexity, Uber and Canva, among others.

Cloudflare down LIVE: Popular graphic design platform Canva was down on Tuesday after a technical issue at Cloudflare took down several other websites, including X (formerly Twitter). Read more here.

Cloudfare down LIVE: Reacting to the massive outage, Cloudfare issued a statement this evening acknowledging the glitch. “Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,” the firm said, adding it was trying to assess the impact.