Cloudflare outage cause revealed as major websites disrupted

The outage affected X, Substack, Canva and many more websites

Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare announced on Friday that it had successfully restored services following a morning outage that temporarily brought down numerous global websites, including LinkedIn and Zoom.

This marks the second such disruption to affect the company in under three weeks.

Cloudflare confirmed the issue was resolved and clarified it was not the result of a cyberattack.

Instead, the company stated that "a change to how its firewall handles requests caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning."

Investigations are ongoing into related issues affecting the Cloudflare Dashboard and its application programming interfaces (APIs).

Cybersecurity experts often note the complexity of pinpointing outage causes.

However, based on Cloudflare's initial statements, Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, suggested Friday's incident stemmed from "a database change they had made as part of planned maintenance that just went slightly awry," effectively overloading their systems.

This marks the second such disruption to affect Cloudflare in under three weeks (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Edinburgh Airport had to shut down briefly on Friday morning. But the airport later said the outage was a localised issue that was not related to Cloudflare.

In November, a three-hour Cloudflare outage affected users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, League of Legends, to the New Jersey Transit system.

Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services.

The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.

Social media platforms X and LinkedIn were impacted by the Cloudflare outage (AFP/Getty)

Amazon also experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October.

“This is one of the things that we are going to see more and more,” said cybersecurity expert Ford.

“We are seeing the frequency increase as organisations put more eggs in fewer baskets, and as the complexity and the size and scale (grow) of operations like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare.”