We Now Know What Caused the Cloudflare Outage on Tuesday Morning.
Tuesday morning was a stark reminder of just how fragile the global internet truly is. Websites from X to ChatGPT were taken down by a massive outage at Cloudflare, the company they rely on for web infrastructure. Countless websites and services around the world rely on Cloudflare to protect against cyberthreats and route traffic through each user’s local servers—all for the sake of performance and reliability. This is, of course, ironic, given today’s events.
When people experience such a large-scale internet outage, speculation becomes confused. What caused it? Was it a simple Cloudflare bug or something malicious? Are hackers attacking Cloudflare and the websites it runs on? But it turns out the former is more likely to be the case than the latter.
The Cloudflare outage was caused by an error.
In a statement to Mashable, Cloudflare confirmed that it had identified the cause of the issue and released a fix. Furthermore, Cloudflare firmly states that there is no reason to believe a cyberattack was the cause of the outage. The full statement is below:
Today, a major outage affected multiple Cloudflare services, beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved by 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file automatically generated to manage dangerous traffic. The file grew larger than expected, causing a crash in the software handling traffic for several Cloudflare services.
To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect some Cloudflare services to experience short-term disruptions due to a natural surge in traffic following the incident, but we expect all services to return to normal within the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be published shortly on blog.cloudflare.com . Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the internet at large for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and work to improve.
The failure appears to have been caused by a preventative measure designed to thwart a potential cyberattack. While this goal is certainly important, it highlights just how complex these systems truly are: a single flaw in a single cybersecurity protocol spiraled out of control and led to a massive network outage.