Cloudflare suffered a major outage on Nov. 18, and it took many major platforms down with it. OpenAI, Spotify, X, and Canva were among just some of the websites and services that went down Tuesday morning.
Feel like you’re experiencing deja vu? Well, you’re not.
The recent Cloudflare outage is not to be confused with the recent Microsoft Azure outage, which resulted in Xbox, Minecraft, and other platforms going down. And don’t forget the other major incident that occurred in October, when issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to Amazon, Reddit, Snapchat, and other big platforms going offline. It’s also completely separate from the June outage, when Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cloudflare took down swaths of the internet
OK, so the internet’s biggest websites and platforms have been going down a lot lately. What’s going on here?
Why do so many websites go down at the same time?
Those big social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and gaming networks are all using the same few major service providers to host and deliver their content, with Cloudflare being one of them.
Cloudflare is one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which is a system that manages web traffic. When Cloudflare functions normally, it manages web traffic and protects platforms from attacks.
“CDNs are distributed infrastructures that accelerate content delivery and enhance user experience by caching and serving web content closer to users,” explained Angelique Medina, Head of Internet Intelligence at the network intelligence company Cisco ThousandEyes, to Mashable. “They essentially serve as the ‘front door’ to websites and applications, with users connecting to Cloudflare’s servers instead of those of its customers.”
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“When this ‘front door’ becomes unavailable, users lose the entry point to many sites and applications,” Medina said. “Given the large number of customers and sites that they service, any meaningful disruption in their ability to deliver content could effectively render large parts of the internet unreachable to users.”
Basically, the internet has consolidated, and we’re all reaping the rewards of that consolidation.
“This isn’t just another technical setback,” said Ramutė Varnelytė, CEO of IPXO, a leading IP resource management platform in Europe, in a statement provided to Mashable. “It’s further proof of how exposed [the] digital economy is to various malfunctions in just a few of the digital infrastructure service providers.”
Are internet outages occurring more frequently?
Back in the earlier days of the internet, there were countless web hosting providers, and many companies even ran their own dedicated servers. Now, companies big and small are all utilizing the same few cloud service providers, whether it be AWS, GCP, or Azure. Cloudflare makes the internet even more vulnerable to disruption, as the company has no one-to-one direct competitor.
“The incident further emphasizes the inherent danger of the entire internet infrastructure relying on a few service providers,” Varnelytė said.
But, is that it? And are these services really going down more than usual? According to Cisco ThousandEyes, which tracks outages and maps them, that’s correct. Web downtime is actually not happening more than usual, even if it seems that way.
“Cisco ThousandEyes has not seen an increase in the frequency of service outages in cloud and other Internet infrastructure providers; however, the number of sites and applications dependent on these services has increased,” Medina shared. “Because these services are increasingly a point of centralization — with a small number of companies handling large swaths of the Internet — if something goes wrong, it can lead to the disruption of many sites and applications around the globe.”
In short, the number of disruptions isn’t increasing. Rather, the shockwaves of individual incidents are getting bigger.
