‘Half the internet’ goes down amid massive Cloudflare outage

Cloudflare has experienced yet another massive outage today, knocking dozens of major websites offline. 

Among those sites affected are Zoom, Canva, Discord, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Substack, Shopify, Coinbase and Vinted. 

On Reddit, one user posted: ‘Here we go again, it’s down!’

Someone relied: ‘Business haulted. Second time in a month. It’s too much for service as crucial as this. Something needs to be done.’ 

While a third said: ‘imagine how much money businesses are losing.’ 

It marks the second outage in less than a month for Cloudflare, which powers internet requests for millions of websites. 

In a service update just after 9am GMT on Friday, Cloudflare said it is ‘investigating the issue’. 

A few minutes later it added: ‘A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.’ 

DownDetector, a site that monitors internet outages, shows more than 4,500 reports from affected UK web users just after 9am GMT. 

Of the customers experiencing issues, 66 per cent said they had a problem with the server connection, 32 per cent with the website and 2 per cent with domains. 

DownDetector was another website initially affected before coming back online. 

Ironically, a site that monitors DownDetector – downdetectorsdowndetector.com – appears to be down too. 

Cloudflare had previously confirmed this morning that it would be conducting ‘scheduled maintenance’ at its Detroit data centre from 9am UTC. 

It said: ‘Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region.’  

Many Reddit users speculated this was the likely cause of the chaos; Cloudflare has been contacted for more information. 

Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, confirmed in an X post an ‘issue impacting the availability of Cloudflare’s network’. 

There are many causes behind online outages, but the problem is mostly due to technical errors relating to configuration. 

Other outages are due to cyber attacks – attempts by criminals to damage or destroy a computer network or system – but Knecht denied this. 

He added: ‘It was not an attack; root cause was disabling some logging to help mitigate this week’s React CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures).

‘Will share full details in a blog post today. Sites should be back online now, but I understand the frustration this causes and the work being.’ 

Other X users waded in on the issue, with one posting: ‘At this point @Cloudflare is taking down our sites more than hackers.’ 

Another simply joked ‘here we go again’ with a shot of a perplexed engineer staring into a stack of computer servers. 

Yet another posted along with a shot of an affected webpage: ‘Damn half the internet is down again – including Downdetector… Is Cloudflare down again?’ 

It was just over two weeks ago that Cloudflare experienced a massive outage, knocking numerous major websites offline. 

Shortly after, Cloudflare admitted in a blog post that its network began ‘experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic’. 

The Silicon Valley company is the foundation of an estimated fifth of all websites worldwide. 

Richard Ford, chief technical officer at Integrity360, said Friday’s episode underlines how much of the internet now depends on a handful of infrastructure providers.

‘For businesses, today is a wake‑up call,’ the expert said. ‘Relying entirely on a single provider for critical infrastructure is a fragile strategy. 

‘Today’s disruption underscores something many of us in cybersecurity and tech have long warned about – as the internet has grown more complex, a handful of infrastructure providers end up holding unexpectedly large power over its functioning. 

‘Cloudflare sits at the heart of that, providing CDN, proxying, routing, DNS and caching so that websites can stay fast, secure and resilient under load.

‘When a provider like this fails, whether due to internal error, configuration change or external attack, the ripple effects hit far more than just a few sites. 

‘What feels like one outage to a user is actually a systemic failure affecting traffic flows across many unrelated organisations.’ 

Jake Moore, tech expert and security advisor at ESET, said: ‘If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable. 

‘The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design. 

‘Furthermore, we have seen multiple errors like this in recent months which have led to catastrophic downtimes for thousands of websites, it therefore potentially offers up new opportunities to threat actors wanting to cause mass disruption.’