Cloudflare stated on Tuesday that it had implemented a fix restoring stability across its network after a global disruption affected access to many online services. The company confirmed that services were mostly operational again, although some users could still face issues accessing the Cloudflare dashboard.
The company said a fix had been applied at 7:42 pm and that engineers were monitoring the network to ensure full recovery. It added that some customers might continue experiencing problems logging into or using the dashboard, and further improvements were being worked on. A later update noted that services were operating normally and error levels had returned to expected levels, while engineering teams continued investigating what caused the disruption. Cloudflare advised users that it was safe to re-enable services that had been temporarily disabled during the incident and stated that a final report would be shared once the internal review was complete. Chief technology officer Dane Knecht wrote on X that Cloudflare had failed its customers and the wider internet earlier in the day as a network problem disrupted large amounts of traffic dependent on its systems. He explained that a latent bug in a service linked to Cloudflare’s bot mitigation capability began to crash after a routine configuration change. The company also mentioned that there had been a spike in unusual traffic hitting one of its services before the disruption intensified.
The incident added to a growing list of recent interruptions to major online platforms. Last month, an outage at Amazon’s cloud service disrupted thousands of websites and applications including Snapchat and Reddit. Cloudflare, which operates one of the largest global networks supporting faster and more reliable website performance, saw shares fall around five percent in premarket trading. Earlier in the afternoon, internet disruptions were widely reported as Cloudflare worked to stabilise its global infrastructure. At 6:09 pm, the company said that changes had helped Cloudflare Access and WARP recover and that error levels had dropped to pre-incident rates. WARP access in London had been restored, with teams continuing work to stabilise additional services. Further updates indicated ongoing efforts to bring application services customers back online. Prior to recovery, Cloudflare reported an issue affecting multiple customers, resulting in widespread 500 errors and failures across the dashboard and API.
NetBlocks stated that several online services worldwide were experiencing disruptions associated with technical issues within Cloudflare’s infrastructure. It clarified that the disruption was not linked to country-level outages or filtering. In Pakistan, Downdetector recorded a rise in reports beginning around 4:10 pm, with related complaints also emerging for OpenAI, Amazon Web Services and Facebook. Social media platform X faced downtime for thousands of users in the United States and other regions, with more than 11,500 reports logged as of 6:41 am ET. It was unclear whether the outages across these services were connected. X and Cloudflare did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. PTA said it was monitoring the global outage and was in contact with international platforms and local operators, noting that observation would continue until full restoration of services.
Cloudflare previously experienced a widespread outage in June 2022 that left many websites unreachable. A DNS server functions as an address directory that maps a website name such as google.com to its numerical IP address. For large scale national use, DNS servers must be capable of managing significant traffic volumes while maintaining fast response times.
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