Cloudflare apologises as outage triggers globalwide disruptions
A global outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare triggered widespread disruptions across major websites and social media platforms yesterday (Nov. 18), including X and ChatGPT.
Thousands of users began reporting issues with the sites, as well as other services, to outage monitoring site Downdetector shortly after 11:30 GMT.
Cloudflare said the “significant outage” occurred after a configuration file designed to handle threat traffic did not work as intended and “triggered a crash” in its software handling traffic for its wider services.
“We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today,” it said in a statement.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the company added.
It said while the issue had been resolved, some services might still encounter errors as they came back online.
A wide range of apps and websites were impacted by the outage.
Users reported encountering delays or technical issues when trying to access services such as Grindr, Zoom and Canva.
‘Sri Lanka Mirror’ also affected
‘Sri Lanka Mirror’ was among the impacted sites, as it too operates through Cloudflare’s global network.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a huge provider of internet security across the world, carrying out services such as checking visitor connections to sites are coming from humans rather than bots.
It says 20% of all websites worldwide use its services in some form.
