CLOUDFLARE has experienced another massive outage leaving a slew of internet sites crippled and thousands of users offline.
Similarly to the outage in November, hundreds of major sites have reportedly been knocked offline in the wake of the outage that began shortly before 1pm.
This marks the third Cloudflare outage in less than two months.
A similar failure began on December 5 when services went down at around 9am, and another brought down “half the internet” on November 18.
Today’s outage saw Microsoft’s AI tool – Copilot – crippled with both the app and website failing.
Over 1,000 users reported an issue with Microsoft Copilot on DownDetector in the wake of the outage.
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The Silicon Valley-based company Cloudflare is the foundation of an estimated fifth of all websites.
Hundreds of major internet sites including Zoom, Canva, Discord, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Substack, Shopify, Coinbase and Vinted rely on Cloudflare’s services to operate.
It remains unclear what sparked today’s outage, which lasted for around an hour.
Many sites that appeared to have been affected earlier now seem to be up and running but some users are still reporting problems on DownDetector.
A post on the Cloudflare’s own site from today explains that: “Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.”
No further explanations for the failure have been given, with internet users left in the dark.
Thousands were left scrambling to get back online with Downdetecter receiving a huge influx of reports on crashed websites.
A staggering 66 per cent of reports on Downdetector indicated server connection issues with Cloudflare.
Internet services were crippled by the outage as users were met with error messages when trying to open internet sites.
Internet users took to social media to rail against the service interuption.
Hundreds left angry posts about the recurring Cloudflare issues with one user posting a message on X reading: “When you want to report Cloudflare is down but Down Detector uses Cloudflare.”
Cloudflare, which provides web security, speed, and routing services for millions of sites, connects users to websites and applications through a huge global network.
This means that when Cloudflare goes down, a huge portion of the internet fails with it.
Cloudflare runs a network of servers spread across more than 330 cities in over 120 countries.
These servers help websites load faster, stay secure and handle traffic smoothly.
Cloudflare’s services connect more than 13,000 internet networks across the world.
These include the biggest internet providers, cloud services, and major companies on the planet.
Dozens of Cloudflare’s sites and services are currently listed as re-routed or partially re-routed.
