A massive internet outage disabled major websites for the second time in about a month.
The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare experienced an unexpected disruption on Friday morning, causing many of the world’s top internet sites to go down. Canva, Coinbase, LinkedIn, Shopify, Substack, and Zoom were among the sites reportedly affected. Users trying to access them received an error message reading “500 Internal Server Error,” according to multiple reports.
DownDetector, a website dedicated to monitoring and reporting outages of key websites worldwide, was also reportedly one of the sites affected by the Cloudflare outage.
Cloudflare’s services are used “by many businesses worldwide,” according to CNBC. The product reportedly assists in securing traffic for nearly “20%” of the internet.”
Cloudflare acknowledged the outage on its company page, stating it was “investigating issues” with its product. At approximately 4 a.m., DownDetector had nearly 2,000 reports of outages related to Cloudflare, Forbes reported.
“Customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed,” read one of the company’s messages on early Friday morning discussing the service disruption.
Around 4:30 a.m. EST, Cloudflare announced it had initiated a remedy for the problem, and the affected internet sites resumed functionality, according to Kate O’Flaherty of Forbes. The publication’s senior contributor said a Cloudflare representative told her the outage was due to an update of the company’s security measures.
“A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare’s network,” a Cloudflare representative told Forbes. “This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.”
HOW DO CLOUD SERVICE OUTAGES HAPPEN?
The latest internet outage follows a troubling trend of disruptions in recent weeks.
In November, a Cloudflare disruption knocked out major websites, including ChatGPT, X, and Zoom. In October, an Amazon Web Services outage caused widespread chaos, shutting down Amazon webpages and services, including those of Amazon, Canva, Grammarly, Robinhood, Snapchat, and streaming services Hulu and Roku.