Cloudflare crashed. So did your favorite internet sites.
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Millions of users woke up to error messages and downed sites all over the internet Tuesday — including ChatGPT, Spotify and X — all due to a problem with Cloudflare.
Why it matters: Much of the internet runs on just a handful of infrastructure operators, meaning everything from health-care services to food delivery software can go dark each time Cloudflare or Amazon Web Services glitch.
Driving the news: Cloudflare first reported a global outage just before 7am ET, which was mostly resolved just before 10am, according to its status updates page.
- Affected websites included Canva, Axios, Politico and internet tracking website DownDetector.
- While most services are now back online, Cloudflare is monitoring for additional disruptions.
Here's what you need to know about internet operators such as Cloudflare:
What is Cloudflare?
What they're saying: "Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," a spokesperson told Axios in an emailed statement.
- "We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today's incident and improve."
Context: Cloudflare powers Internet requests for "millions of websites" and adds "tens of thousands" of new properties to its portfolio each day, according to its site.
- "Our services run silently in the background, keeping many of the websites and services you depend on up and running."
Why did Cloudflare crash Tuesday?
A configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threatening traffic caused Tuesday's outage, according to a company spokesperson.
- The file "grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare's services."
Threat level: Cloudflare is a leading Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) prevention service, meaning it specializes in prohibiting hackers from flooding a website with traffic to intentionally cause an outage.
- The firm told Axios that there is "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity."
- It expects all services to "return to normal in the next few hours."
What do Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services do?
Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services offer increasingly similar products but started out in their own lanes.
- Cloudflare is more focused on content delivery, web traffic performance and web security.
- Meanwhile, AWS offers a wide-range of cloud hosting services that support the backend of millions of websites.
How often do internet networks crash?
Between the lines: These services don't go down all that often, but when they do, just about every internet user will feel it.
- Just last month, AWS had an outage that caused disruptions to Medicare platforms, Zoom, Venmo, WhatsApp and many other banking, social media and consumer apps.
- The incidents show how fragile the internet can be, and how just one broken link can hamstring critical services globally.
Flashback: A massive outage at cybersecurity company Crowdstrike in 2024 caused hospitals to pause all non-urgent surgical procedures, canceled flights while causing days-long airport delays and even stopped mobile ordering from Starbucks.
- That fiasco wasn't malicious either, but it caused more interruptions than any cyberattack in history.
Go deeper: CrowdStrike outages poses wake-up call for weak supply chain security
