Cloudflare today suffered a massive global outage on Thursday that caused error pages to display on millions of sites. As of 12:21 PM GMT, the company confirmed the ongoing outage, which has raised concerns among internet users and businesses alike. Whatever caused this disruption is still not known, but experts say a major cyber-attack is the least likely possibility.
Cloudflare, often referred to as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” plays a crucial role in internet infrastructure. Professor Alan Woodward, of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, pictured above, said the company acts as a “censorship gatekeeper.” Using proprietary technology, it continuously monitors traffic to clients’ websites and helps defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This absolutely critical function speaks to the trust and deliverability that customers have come to rely on from Cloudflare, which makes this outage so scary and concerning.
As the outage persists, Cloudflare reported, “We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.” We’re continuing to actively investigate the cause, and restoring full functionality to all of our services as quickly as possible.
As experts such as Prof. Woodward have observed, companies like Cloudflare are an outlier companies in shaping the internet’s infrastructure. He noted, “We’re seeing how few of these companies there are in the infrastructure of the internet, so that when one of them fails it becomes really obvious quickly.” This anecdote is a small but great example of the connected, interoperable online service environment. One point of failure can cause national domino effects.
One thing Prof. Woodward doesn’t see as likely is a cyber-attack on a service as large and intricate as Cloudflare. He remarked, “A cyber-attack on a service as large as Cloudflare was unlikely to have a single point of failure.”
As Cloudflare continues its efforts to resolve the issues, users worldwide remain on alert for updates and potential impacts on their online activities. The company underpins our web security, web performance and much of the free web. This extensive outage will have long-term consequences across all sectors that rely on stable, redundant internet infrastructure.