Issues with Cloudflare — one of the internet’s major infrastructure providers — led to massive outages Tuesday morning as East Coast folks logged on to work. We’re now starting to get answers as to why that happened.
Cloudflare emailed a statement to Mashable, suggesting that unusual, heavy traffic to its services was to blame. The company has not yet stated whether the unusual traffic appears to be of a nefarious nature.
Read the statement from Cloudflare:
Mashable Light Speed
“We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic. We will post updates to cloudflarestatus.com and more in-depth analysis when it is ready to blog.cloudflare.com.”
That spike in unusual traffic, it seems, sparked the massive issues on Tuesday. The list of services experiencing outages was vast, but appeared to include heavy hitters like OpenAI, X, Grindr, and many more. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection would be affected by a Cloudflare outage. User-reported issues on Downdetector continued to spike as we neared 10 a.m. ET, indicating the problems persisted. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
“We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact,” read the most recent update on Cloudflare’s status page.
Like the recent AWS outage, Cloudflare is one of the major pillars of the internet. When it goes down, the downstream effects are serious and vast — as we’re seeing Tuesday.
