DOZENS of websites were crippled by a major outage which sparked chaos across the globe this morning.
Zoom, Deliveroo and LinkedIn were among a number of sites hit when Cloudflare – an internet network services business – went down at around 9am.
Cloudflare provides web security, speed, and routing services for millions of sites, so when it goes down, anything that relies on it cannot load.
Shopping sites such as JustEat, Etsy and Vinted were also affected this morning as well as some news media, including Politico and Axios.
Other sites like Substack, Discord, Canva, Shopify and Amazon Web Spaces are among those using Cloudflare services that users reported problems with on DownDetector.
Many sites that appeared to be affected earlier now seem to be up and running but some users are still reporting problems on DownDetector.
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Cloudflare have since claimed the outage was not caused by an “attack”.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht posted on X, formerly Twitter: “We are aware of the issue impacting the availability of Cloudflare’s network.
“It was not an attack; root cause was disabling some logging to help mitigate this week’s React CVE.
“Will share full details in a blog post today. Sites should be back online now, but I understand the frustration this causes”
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 which explains why so many sites were crippled due to the outage.
But fuming users had already weighed in with their frustrations on social media after the initial outage.
One said: “Half the internet runs on Cloudflare. When it goes down, it’s two engineers praying the whole web doesn’t collapse. Funny and terrifying that it’s basically true.”
Another moaned: “Cloudflare is down again, I’d rather log off and start my weekend.”
“At this point Cloudflare is taking down our sites more than hackers,” quipped a third.
One commented: “Cloudflare is once again having issues, making it impossible to access many websites & games…”
The Cloudflare system connects some 13,000 internet networks, including some of the world’s biggest internet providers, websites and apps.
Around 20 per cent of all websites using its services in some form.
Many of the platforms that were knocked offline use those servers.
It comes after Cloudflare was crippled by a major outage last month on November 18.
Cloudflare desperately worked to restore services after reports began flooding in.
Just weeks before, a similar outage of Amazon Web Services brought down thousands of sites.
