Cloudflare Suffered a Major Outage.
If you’re having trouble accessing websites and services online this morning, it’s not just you: Cloudflare appears to have experienced a global outage.
When I try to load sites like X or, oddly enough, Downdetector, I encounter various errors. X shows an internal service error, and Downdetector asks me to “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.” (I definitely don’t have that permission.) You might encounter similar errors on sites you try this morning, even ones you visit casually. For example, in this article, I would type queries into Google and click on the top search results to reach sites I’ve never heard of before, but I’d end up with similar error messages.
This is because a significant portion of the global internet relies on Cloudflare. Cloudflare offers companies a variety of services, including web infrastructure and cybersecurity products. Therefore, when Cloudflare goes down, many of these websites also go down—a kind of domino effect.
It’s unclear at this point what exactly caused the outage, but as Techradar noted , Cloudflare announced scheduled maintenance on some of its web servers for November 18th, which will run from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM UTC (7:00 AM to 10:00 AM ET), so it’s possible something happened during that maintenance and disrupted the service.
While this is a serious internet outage, it’s far from the first. Furthermore, an AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage effectively paralyzed the internet last month . This morning’s Cloudflare outage exemplifies the risk of so many companies consolidating their web service needs : if one service goes down, a significant portion of the internet goes down.
Cloudflare will likely fix this issue on Tuesday, so I think we’ll all be back to normal soon. I’ll keep this article updated as developments occur.