UPDATE 7:15PM: In a Tuesday night blog post, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince provided more details on today’s outage, which he says is Cloudflare’s worst since 2019. While the company initially suspected they were being hit by a DDoS attack, Prince says the “issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind.”
Instead, a change to one of the company’s database systems’ permissions “caused the database to output multiple entries into a ‘feature file’ used by our Bot Management system,” Prince writes. “That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
“The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats,” Prince adds. “The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.”
Among the changes Cloudflare will make going forward is “enabling more global kill switches for features,” he says. For those who want more technical details, the blog breaks it down.
UPDATE 3:30PM: Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht says the company “resolved the impact to traffic flowing through our network” around 9:30 a.m. ET. However, “the incident required some additional work to fully restore our control plane (our dashboard and the APIs our customers use to configure Cloudflare), [which] should now be fully available.”
Cloudflare is “monitoring those services and continuing to ensure that everything is fully operational. Again, we plan to share a complete walkthrough of what went wrong today in a couple of hours and how we plan to make sure this never happens again,” he wrote on X.
UPDATE 11:25AM: Cloudflare’s CTO is blaming “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability” for today’s outage. It “started to crash after a routine configuration change we made,” which “cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services.”
Dane Knecht stressed that this was “not an attack,” and “work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again.” He promised to share more details in a few hours.
“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” he added. “The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.”
Downdetector says it has logged 2.1+ million reports of connectivity issues globally today, 453K+ of which came from the US.
UPDATE 9:50AM: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” Cloudflare says.
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UPDATE 9AM: Cloudflare says a “fix is being implemented” for the issue causing outages. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” it said at 8:10 a.m. EST.
Still, as more people wake up and try to sign on to various platforms, reports on Downdetector have increased substantially. Users are having issues on Canva, ChatGPT, Claude, Doordash, Grindr, Indeed, Truth Social, Uber, X, Zoom, and more. It’s not confirmed that all of these issues are Cloudflare-related, but it’s likely, as many reports spiked around 8:30 a.m. EST.
“We are continuing [to work] on restoring service for application services customers,” Cloudflare said at 8:59 a.m. EST.
Original Story:
Struggling to access websites or apps? It may be because of an outage of Cloudflare services, which is impacting third-party tools like ChatGPT and X.
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As reported by users on Downdetector, Cloudflare first experienced issues at 6:15 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Nov. 18. The brand acknowledged problems, saying, “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers.”
Many websites have widespread 500 errors. So far, outages are confirmed for social media network X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and film review platform Letterboxd.
On its status website, OpenAI said, “We have confirmed that the incident is caused by an issue with one of our third-party service providers. We will provide updates as they become available.” There are also issues with its APIs and video-generation platform Sora.
At 7:20 a.m. EST, Cloudflare announced that it was beginning to see services recover, although it noted, “Customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” The brand has since said it is “continuing to investigate this issue.”
Last month, a major Amazon Web Services outage saw over 2,000 websites and apps taken offline for hours. The brand later confirmed that the issues stemmed from a “latent defect” in its largest cluster of data centers, called US-East-1.
Spotify’s mobile app has also been experiencing issues today, with some users finding that playing a podcast makes both the Android and iOS apps crash.
Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.
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