Cloudflare commented on the global outage that affected many websites: what they said

Cloudflare commented on the outage, against the backdrop of which error messages began to appear on various websites, including X and Open AI, stating that they observed a surge in unusual traffic and would investigate the causes, UNN reports with reference to The Guardian.

Details

According to the publication, a key element of the usually hidden internet infrastructure suffered a global outage. Cloudflare, an American company that provides services to protect millions of websites from malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem on Tuesday, due to which users were unable to access the websites of some clients.

Some website owners were also unable to access their control panels. According to Downdetector, sites including X and Open AI experienced increased outages simultaneously with Cloudflare's problems.

The outage is ongoing, but as of 12:21 GMT (14:21 Kyiv time), the company stated: "We are observing a recovery of services, but customers may still observe a higher than usual error rate as we continue troubleshooting."

The next message read: "Update: We are continuing to investigate this issue."

And later it was stated: "The problem has been identified, and a fix is being implemented."

"We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to resume operation. Error rates for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident levels," Cloudflare noted.

And added: "We continue to work on restoring services for application service clients."

A Cloudflare spokesperson said: "We observed a surge in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare's services, which began at 11:20 AM. This led to errors in the operation of some traffic passing through the Cloudflare network. While most traffic for most services continued to operate normally, many Cloudflare services experienced an increased number of errors."

"We do not yet know the cause of the surge in unusual traffic. We are fully focused on ensuring that all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual surge in traffic," a Cloudflare spokesperson said.

According to the publication, Cloudflare engineers planned to perform maintenance on data centers in Tahiti, Los Angeles, Atlanta in the US, and Santiago in Chile on Tuesday, but it is not yet clear whether their actions are related to the outage.

In particular, in an attempt to resolve the issue, the company disabled the WARP encryption service in London and announced: "Users in London attempting to access the internet via WARP will experience connection issues."

Later they reported: "We have re-enabled WARP access in London."

Alan Woodward, a professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, called Cloudflare "the biggest company you've never heard of." The company states that it provides services to "protect your websites, applications, APIs, and AI workloads while improving performance."

Woodward called the company a "gatekeeper" and stated that its functions include monitoring traffic on sites to protect against distributed denial-of-service attacks, where attackers try to overload sites with requests. The company also verifies whether users are human.

Cloudflare's problems came less than a month after an Amazon Web Services outage that took down thousands of websites.

Global Amazon outage paralyzes part of the internet: millions of people without access20.10.25, 12:15 • 4093 views

"We see how few such companies there are in the internet infrastructure, so when one of them goes down, it becomes very quickly obvious," Woodward said.

Although the cause remains unclear, Woodward noted that it is unlikely to be a cyberattack, as such a large service is unlikely to have a single point of failure.