If you’ve tried logging into social media or want to write a quick review of the movie you’ve just watched, there’s a good chance you’ve run into an error message. That’s because internet cybersecurity and network company Cloudflare has gone down.
Cloudflare clarifies on the Cloudflare system status website that “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented”, though it will be some time until we hear why this happened (assuming we ever will).
Cloudflare goes on to state, “We are continuing to work towards restoring other services”, and that access has reportedly been restored in London.
Cloudflare doesn’t publicly announce its customers, but the recent outage gives us a good idea of who they could be. Social media site X was taken down as Cloudflare was, and so too was Letterboxd, ChatGPT and Canva (this one also went down during the recent AWS outage). Notably, Down Detector, which is the site I use to know if a site is down, was ironically also taken down.
Perhaps the most surprising outage I noticed was on a McDonald’s order screen, as was pointed out over on the Cloudflare subreddit.
Even my local McDonald is broken lol from r/CloudFlare
Just last month, Amazon’s server went down for 15 hours. In this case, that appears to be all down to a single software bug, but we don’t actually know what caused Cloudflare’s issue.
AWS going down took Fortnite, Roblox, and even Reddit with it, and estimates place the damages of that outage at over $75 million per hour.
Cloudflare doesn’t appear to have hit games quite as hard, but it has resources for those games, like the Arc Raiders interactive map is not currently available.
X alternative BlueSky is still live, but Deck Blue, effectively a Tweet Deck for BlueSky, is not currently available.
As of 13:35 UTC / 5:35 PT, Cloudflare says it is “continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”
Alas, I attempted to log a movie on Letterboxd and was met with an error screen. With my opinions on movies, that’s probably a good thing.
In a statement given to our friends over at TechRadar, Cloudflare has stated:
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to blog.cloudflare.com.”
Cloudflare has just updated its system status website to reiterate the last message. Naturally, this means the outage has not yet been fixed yet.
“We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.”
As you might be able to guess from, well, anything happening on the internet, the Cloudflare subreddit has just erupted in memes and jokes at the internet companies’ expense.
I thought I’d take a peek to see if there was any more information given on what is happening, and I was met with the following.
First day working at Cloudflare. Gonna do some network updates, hope everything goes well 🙏 from r/CloudFlare
