Internet users reported massive outages across platforms using Cloudflare, including Zoom, Canva, LinkedIn, and even DownDetector.
Cloudflare provides services to major websites, including Discord, Notion, X, Spotify, Canva, GitHub, and Stack Overflow.
Shopping sites are affected too – Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, H&M, as well as some news media, including Politico, Axios, the BBC and more.
Even Down Detector, the website which tracks internet and app outages, is experiencing issues.
Cloudflare said shortly after 9am that it is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs (application programming interfaces)’.
The software business said users have seen ‘a large number of empty pages’ as a result.
It added shortly after that it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is now monitoring the results.
Cloudflare is a company that helps nearly two in 10 websites secure and manage their internet traffic. Many of the platforms that were knocked offline use those servers.
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In late November, dozens of websites using Cloudflare crashed, prompting the company’s co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, to apologise ‘for the pain we caused the Internet’ in a blog post.
Prince said that the outage was caused by the system it uses to protect websites from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks crashing.
DDoS are an attempt to disrupt a server’s traffic by overwhelming it, though Prince stressed the outage was not itself caused by a cyberattack.
It’s unclear what’s caused today’s outages, but if you’re experiencing issues, you are not alone.
Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, said: ‘If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable.
‘The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.’
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