Services from Cloudflare, a software company that supports thousands of websites, including X, Spotify, and OpenAI, on Tuesday reported a crash in one of its software systems, according to a report in the New York Times.
Cloudflare, which provides tools to secure and manage internet traffic for websites, reported earlier in the day that it was experiencing issues across its global network, disrupting access to numerous websites and apps.
According to the company, it believed the situation had been fully resolved by around 9:30 a.m., roughly four hours after it first flagged the problems. It noted that it was still monitoring the system.
Cloudflare said the incident stemmed from a file that triggered “a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.” It added that there was “no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.”
Users began noting difficulties accessing websites and apps that rely on Cloudflare shortly before 7 a.m. The company confirmed on its status page that an issue “potentially impacts multiple customers.”
By 8:15 a.m., Cloudflare reported that error rates for some services had “returned to pre-incident rates,” while technicians continued working to restore remaining services.
Cloudflare’s tools help websites defend against cyberattacks and optimize how content is delivered. Its software can block harmful traffic and direct users to servers closest to them for faster loading.
Many smaller websites rely on Cloudflare’s free tier, while major platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) pay for more advanced services.
Several online platforms appeared to be affected by Cloudflare’s issues, including Spotify, Amazon, and OpenAI, according to the outage tracker DownDetector.
The disruption underscores how heavily the global internet depends on a few major companies. Last month, Amazon Web Services suffered an outage that interfered with numerous online services for hours. Days later, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform also experienced downtime.
And last year, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a far more extensive outage that led to a global I.T. breakdown impacting airlines, hospitals, and a range of digital services.
“We now have AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare outages in the span of a month,” said David Choffnes, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University. “That’s a very large portion of the biggest cloud providers in the world.”
“It has not been the case that we have seen major outages like this in a short period of time,” he added. “Companies have had outages before, but they tend to be pretty rare. These companies are supposed to be really, really good at keeping things up.”
“Cloudflare is an essential company, providing services to a fifth of the internet and handling literally trillions of requests every day,” said Timothy Edgar, a computer science professor at Brown University and a cybersecurity expert.
He said the event was “another alarming example of how dependent we have become on critical internet infrastructure and how little the government is doing to hold big companies accountable.”
AFP
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