Cloudflare Is Experiencing a Massive Outage
If you’re having trouble accessing sites and services on the internet this morning, it’s not just you: it appears Cloudflare is facing a global outage.
When I tried to load sites like X, ChatGPT or, ironically, Downdetector, I encountered various errors. X showed me an internal service error, while Downdetector asked me to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.” (I certainly don’t have that authority.) You might encounter similar errors on websites you try to load this morning, even on those you don’t visit regularly. For the purposes of this article, for example, I was doing Google queries and clicking on top results from websites I’d never heard of before, only to encounter similar error messages.
Indeed, much of the global Internet depends on Cloudflare to function. Cloudflare offers a host of business services, including web infrastructure and cybersecurity products. So when Cloudflare goes down, many of these websites go down as well – a domino effect.
It’s not yet clear what caused the outage, but, as spotted by Techradar, Cloudflare had announced scheduled maintenance for some of its web servers for November 18, between 12:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. UTC (7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. ET), so it’s possible that something happened during this work to interrupt service.
The good news is that it appears many of these sites are back up and running, at least for now. At 8:09 a.m. ET, Cloudflare reported that it had identified the issue and was working on a fix. Although the official status page still states that the Cloudflare global network is experiencing issues, we hope the company resolves these issues quickly.
What do you think of it so far?
While this is indeed a major internet outage, it’s far from the first time this has happened. In fact, an AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage shut down the Internet last month. With Cloudflare’s outage this morning, it’s an example of the risks so many businesses are putting their web service needs in one basket: if one server goes, so does a large part of the web.
Cloudflare will likely fix this issue on Tuesday, so I imagine we’ll all be back to business as usual soon enough. I will keep this article updated with developments as they occur.
