Global Web Disruptions as Cloudflare Outage Exposes Fragility of Internet Infrastructure
A major component of the internet’s behind-the-scenes infrastructure experienced a significant global outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to websites around the world.
Cloudflare, a leading US-based company that protects millions of websites from cyberattacks and provides key performance services, was hit by an unexpected technical issue that temporarily prevented users from accessing some of its customers’ websites.
During the outage, a number of site owners were unable to view their performance dashboards, while major platforms including X and OpenAI also reported increased downtime, according to Downdetector.
The disruption was first logged at 11:48am London time. By 2:48pm, Cloudflare announced that a fix had been implemented, stating: “We believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson apologised to customers and the wider internet community, saying: “We’re sorry for letting you down today. We will learn from this incident and improve.”
While engineers worked to correct the issue, the company temporarily disabled its Warp encryption service in London, noting: “Users in London trying to access the internet via Warp will see connection failures.”
Cybersecurity expert Prof Alan Woodward from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security described Cloudflare as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” highlighting its crucial role in defending the web. Cloudflare’s services help safeguard websites, apps, APIs and AI systems, while also improving their performance.
Woodward called the company a “gatekeeper” of the internet, noting that it filters web traffic to block distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and verifies whether users are human.
After applying the fix, Cloudflare confirmed the outage was triggered by a configuration file used to manage threat traffic. The file had grown far larger than expected, causing a crash in the software responsible for directing traffic across several Cloudflare services.
Cloudflare clarified there was “no evidence” of an attack or malicious activity. The company added that some services might see brief performance dips as traffic surges post-incident, but all systems were expected to fully stabilise within hours.
This incident follows a major Amazon Web Services outage less than a month ago, which also disrupted thousands of websites.
Commenting on the broader issue, Woodward added: “We’re seeing how few companies operate within the backbone of the internet. When one of them fails, the impact becomes visible very quickly.”
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