Cloudflare Issues Fix After Global Outage Disrupts Major Websites
According to CNBC US internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered its latest major service outage on Friday, briefly knocking huge swathes of the internet offline before the company managed to fix the issue. The incident once again highlighted the central role Cloudflare plays in keeping large portions of the internet stable and the risks of such dependence when failures occur.
The outage took down Cloudflare’s dashboard and other supporting applications, which disrupted the platform’s traffic routing and security tools used by thousands of websites worldwide. Major platforms such as LinkedIn, Coinbase, Substack, Shopify, HSBC, and Deliveroo were showing widespread errors and loading failures at about 9:16 a.m. London time, according to Down Detector. Even Down Detector had a short downtime.
Within minutes, Cloudflare said it had deployed a patch and was monitoring its effectiveness. Following the deployment of the patch, reports of outages quickly declined.
Cloudflare’s shares initially fell as much as 4.5% in premarket trading after the outage reports. Losses narrowed to around 2% after the company confirmed that the issue was fixed. The rebound could suggest that investors saw the fix as credible—but the repeated disruption raised eyebrows nonetheless.
This crash comes less than three weeks after another high profile Cloudflare failure that triggered error messages across a large portion of the web. At the time, Cloudflare described the incident as “unacceptable” given its role in supporting critical internet infrastructure.
Today’s repeat outage raises scrutiny: Cloudflare technology underpins about 20% of all web traffic, with services ranging from content delivery to DDoS protection. With that level of ubiquity, any systemic problem ripples from major platforms through smaller businesses.
While Cloudflare took immediate action to remedy the situation, two major outages in as many weeks have shaken the confidence of both customers and investors. Providing the backbone for a sizeable part of the internet means that Cloudflare must work out how to be more resilient and proactive over such incidents.
The most recent incident is a reminder of both the power and vulnerability of centralized internet infrastructure: when a core service stumbles, immediate ripple effects radiate far and wide.
