Global outage hits Cloudflare again, disrupting major websites

The incident led to access issues in several major platforms, including Canva, and even Downdetector, the highly-used service to track outages. Several Indian websites and several services, as well as news websites, faced the disruption, too.

This marks Cloudflare's second disruption in less than a month. A similar technical issue in November had temporarily knocked out a range of services, including Spotify, ChatGPT, and US President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform.

To date, Cloudflare has not released an official statement providing details on the cause or extent of the most recent outage.

The unexpected shutdown saw irate users throng social media platform X, with several hashtags about the outage trending within no time. Netizens expressed anger over repeated disruptions, highlighting how the service failures had impacted their work, business operations, and online activities.

Adding to users' frustrations, even Downdetector — a platform on which people rely to confirm when there are outages — was hit, leaving many unsure of the extent of the disruption.

As the rate of the outages has raised some questions, users are calling for fast action and more transparent communications from Cloudflare to avoid such situations in the future.

Last month, Cloudflare witnessed a major global disruption due to an internal configuration mistake. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had denied cyberattack speculations.

The outage disrupted several major platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Canva, Discord, and many other websites and apps around the world. In a post-mortem, Prince explained that the problem began when the company made a change to permissions on a ClickHouse database cluster.

The update was meant to improve access to data, but a faulty query caused the system to pull in far more information than it should have. This error made a key “feature file” used by Cloudflare’s Bot Management system grow too large.