Cloudflare investigates outage that brought down sites including Zoom and LinkedIn
MADRID– Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said Friday it had restored its services following a morning outage that brought down several global websites, including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks.
Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved and was not caused by an attack. A change in how its firewall handles requests “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,” the company said.
It said it was “investigating issues with the Cloudflare Dashboard and associated APIs,” or the application programming interface that allows software systems to communicate with each other.
Cybersecurity experts say it usually takes time to pinpoint the exact cause of an outage.
But based on Cloudflare’s initial statements, Friday’s incident “boiled down to a database change made as part of planned maintenance that went slightly wrong,” according to Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, a cybersecurity company based in Europe and Africa.
This “effectively overloaded their systems,” he said.
Edinburgh Airport had to briefly close its doors on Friday morning. But the airport later said the outage was a localized problem that was not related to Cloudflare.
In November, a three-hour Cloudflare outage affected users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game “League of Legends” to New Jersey’s public transit system.
Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a patch to resolve an outage in its Azure cloud portal that prevented users from accessing Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.
Amazon also experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October.
“That’s one of the things we’re going to see more and more of,” cybersecurity expert Ford said. “We’re seeing an increase in frequency as organizations put more eggs in fewer baskets and as the complexity, size and scale (grows) of operations like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare. »
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This version has been updated to reflect that Edinburgh Airport says its temporary shutdown was not linked to the Cloudflare outage.
