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Services from Cloudflare, a software company, underpin thousands of websites, including X, Spotify and OpenAI. The company said a crash in a software system was to blame.
Victor Mather
Cloudflare, a company that helps websites secure and manage their internet traffic, experienced issues with its global network, the company said early Tuesday, disrupting service for many websites and apps.
The company said it believed the problems were mostly resolved by around 9:30 a.m. Eastern, roughly four hours after issues were first reported. At 12:45 it said the service was “operating normally.”
The company said the cause was a file that set off “a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.” It said there was “no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity.”
Users began reporting problems with websites and apps that use Cloudflare before 7 a.m. The company acknowledged on its website an issue that “potentially impacts multiple customers.”
By 8:15 a.m., the company said that error levels for some of its services had “returned to pre-incident rates,” and that it was continuing to work on restoring other services.
Cloudflare provides tools to help websites fight off cyberattacks and load content efficiently. Its software can block malicious attacks and help route internet traffic so that users are delivered content from servers located closest to them.
Many smaller sites use Cloudflare’s free service, while bigger sites like X (formerly Twitter) pay for more comprehensive service.
Multiple online services appeared to have been affected by the issues at Cloudflare, including Spotify and OpenAI, according to DownDetector, an online outage tracker.
The outage is a reminder that certain companies have an outsize role in making the global internet work. Last month, Amazon Web Services experienced problems with its service, disrupting a wide range of online services for hours. Days later, Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service system, also experienced an outage.
And last year, the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike experienced a bigger outage that caused a global I.T. meltdown that hit airlines, hospitals and other online services.
“We now have AWS, Azure and Cloudflare outages in the span of a month,” said David Choffnes, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University. “That’s a very large portion of the biggest cloud providers in the world.”
“It has not been the case that we have seen major outages like this in a short period of time,” he said. “Companies have had outages before, but they tend to be pretty rare. These companies are supposed to be really, really good at keeping things up.”
“Cloudflare is an essential company, providing services to a fifth of the internet and handling literally trillions of requests every day,” said Timothy Edgar, a computer science professor at Brown and an expert on cybersecurity.
He said the outage was “another alarming example of how dependent we have become on critical internet infrastructure, and how little the government is doing to hold big companies accountable.”
Adam Satariano contributed reporting.
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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