Companies like OpenAI, Spotify and X (formerly Twitter) experienced online outages this morning due to a disruption at Cloudflare, the web infrastructure firm used by roughly one-fifth of all websites globally. The outage, which started around 5: 20 et today (Nov. 18) and was resolved four hours later, is the latest incident emphasizing the overload of programs that will bring down the Internet.
Cloudflare said in a statement of the incident that the file “grew beyond the expected size of the installation and bloomed a vulnerability in the software system.” The company added that there is currently no evidence of an attack or malicious activity and assured customers that services will gradually return throughout the day.
Cloudflare first addressed the issue on its system status page, where it reported “internal resource corruption” this morning. At about 9:40 et, the company said it applied a fix. The outage prompted more than 11,000 reports filed at Dowdetector, a platform that tracks resource disruptions online.
What is Cloudflare?
Headquartered in San Francisco, Cloudflare was founded by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloy and Michelle Zatlyn. Originally conceived in a project aimed at tracking the sources of email spam, it has since evolved into a Cloud and Cyberfle provider. The company, which counts about 35 percent of the Fortune 500 among its millions of customers, is known for maintaining a wall of more than 100 lights in its headquarters used to generate random data for encryption keys.
The exit follows a recent historic disruption in Crowdydsstrike, where a software update from the Texas-based company triggered a $30 billion outflow that removed $30 billion from its market cap. The incident, called “the biggest crime in history,” hit health care and banking in particular, each estimated to lose upwards of ten figures.
More recent releases have been added to the difficulty. In October, a bug in Amazon Web Services’ automation software affected thousands of companies, including Signal, Snapchat and Duolingo. Just days later, Microsoft’s Azure experienced a similar incident after a maintenance change caused an outage affecting customers from Alaska Airlines to Vodafone.
These events revealed that the integration of Internet services amplifies the impact of any single disruption. AWS controlled about 32 percent of the Cloud Provider Market, close behind at 23 percent. Cloudflare, currently, supports about 20 percent of the Global Web.
Cloudflare is promised to improve going forward. “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” the company said. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today.”
