DOZENS of websites have been crippled by a major outage which sparked chaos across the globe.
Twitter, Spotify and Uber were among a number of sites hit when Cloudflare – an internet network services business – went down shortly after 11am this morning.
More than 10,000 people reported issues related to Cloudflare on DownDetector – a site also hit by the outage – although the true scale of the impact is set to be far more.
Zoom, Cloudflare itself, X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Uber, League of Legends, Grindr and more were all shut down by the catastrophic failure.
Roughly a fifth of all internet sites are reportedly using some form of Cloudflare service and have been affected by the outage.
The crippling failure rippled out from its source hitting a huge portion of the internet with the firm behind Cloudflare now working desperately to restore services.
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Cloudflare provides web security, speed, and routing services for millions of sites, so when it goes down, anything that relies on it cannot load.
The outage is understood to have originated from Cloudflare Global Network – a distributed network of data centres that connects users to websites.
Downdetector, a site used to report outages, saw tens of thousands of reports that major websites were out of action in the wake of the monumental outage.
Cloudflare said it is desperately working to restore services after reports began flooding in.
The firm said it suffered an “internal service degradation” that may intermittently impact some services.
Cloudflare operates a massive network of servers across more than 330 locations in over 120 countries.
This web of servers helps websites load faster and handle traffic smoothly.
The system connects some 13,000 internet networks, including some of the world’s biggest internet providers, websites and apps.
Sites like Ikea, Vinted, Dayforce, OpenAI and Amazon Web Spaces are among those using Cloudflare services and have been crippled by the outage.
Online multiplayer games and even the Scottish Parliament website have also been impacted.
Cloudflare is one of the world’s biggest network providers with 20 per cent of all websites using its services in some form.
By midday today tens of thousands of service outage reports had been made and a huge portion of the internet was left unable to load.
A statement from the company read: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.
“Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
Work remains ongoing to fully restore all of the affected sites and apps.
Cloudflare, which offers services like checking that website visitors are humans not bots, says around a fifth of all global websites use it in some way.
The company had scheduled maintenance for the SCL – Santiago – data centre for Tuesday.
X users have been posting relentlessly on Downdetector about the issue.
One wrote: “When I try to log in, I receive the following error message: ‘Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later’.”
Another said: “Keep getting suspicious log in message when I try to log in and blocks me logging in, what is going on?”
A third person posted: “My DMs on Twitter are not loading. It just says empty box. Yesterday it was fine.”
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The problem at Cloudflare comes less than a month after a similar outage of Amazon Web Services brought down thousands of sites.
This is a breaking news story. You can follow us for more updates.
