Khaberni - Cloudflare, which specializes in internet infrastructure, experienced a service outage on Tuesday, causing many major websites to stop working for users around the world, according to CNBC.
Many websites resumed operation within a few hours, and in an update on its status page at about 9:57 AM Eastern Time, Cloudflare announced a solution to the problem, although it noted that some users might still experience issues accessing the electronic control panel.
The company added, "We continue to monitor for bugs to ensure all services return to normal."
According to Downdetector, the e-commerce platform Shopify, the job search engine Indeed, the chat platform Cloud by Anthropic, Donald Trump's Truth Social platform, and Elon Musk's social networking site X, were among the sites affected by Cloudflare's issues.
According to Detector, access to this platform was briefly unavailable for some users, and some digital services of NJ Transit were also down due to the outage.
The status page of OpenAI indicated that ChatGPT and its associated short video app Sura had fully recovered after facing issues due to an "external service provider."
A spokesperson for Cloudflare stated that the "root cause" of the disruption was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic, which "exceeded the expected number of entries," causing a software system handling the traffic of many of their services to crash.
The company noted it had seen a "sudden spike in unusual traffic" around 5:20 AM Eastern Time.
The spokesperson added that there is no evidence the interruption was due to an attack or malicious activity, and said, "Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any disruption is unacceptable," "We apologize to our customers and internet users for our failure today."
Many companies around the world use Cloudflare's program, which helps manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the internet; among its services, it provides protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks, which occur when attackers overload a website's system with a massive amount of traffic requests, rendering it inoperative.
Cloudflare's stock fell by more than 4%.
This issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services experienced a full-day outage, leading to the downtime of many online services, followed by a global outage of Microsoft Azure Cloud and 365 services.
In July 2024, a faulty software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a widespread outage that temporarily halted flights, affected financial services, and forced hospitals to delay procedures.
