Cloudflare Outage Cripples The Web As Top Sites Go Offline
Cloudflare is scrambling to fix a major issue that is wreaking havoc across the web. Following rounds of scheduled maintenance at datacenters in various locations, Cloudflare’s status dashboard confirms the firm is dealing with “internal service degradation” that is intermittently affecting access to popular websites, including social media site X, OpenAI, Spotify, and the list goes on.
So yes, if you run into a Cloudflare error message, you can at least rest easy knowing it’s not just you or an issue with your device. That wasn’t immediately obvious to us, given the intermittent errors. While perusing the web this morning, some of the sites we visited returned a Cloudflare error message, but then would load fine after a refresh.
The first indication of a problem was revealed on Cloudflare’s dashboard at around 6:17 a.m. EST this morning.
“Our support portal provider is currently experiencing issues, and as such customers might encounter errors viewing or responding to support cases. Responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise). We are working alongside our 3rd party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem,” Cloudflare stated before acknowledging more widespread issues affecting its global network.
Since then, Cloudflare posted a series of updates confirming a wider issue and an ongoing investigation into the matter, but hasn't specified what exactly is causing the ongoing disturbance. Two months ago, Cloudflare thwarted a then-record 11.5Tbps DDoS attack, but there's no indication that today's outage is the result of something similar.
“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts,” Cloudflare stated at around 7:21 a.m. EST this morning.
At 8:09 a.m. EST, Cloudflare posted an update saying it identified the root cause “and a fix is being implemented.” A few minutes later, it posted, “We are continuing to work towards restoring other services.”
As of this writing, we’re still seeing issues, though things are slowly improving.
