The Outage
Cloudflare was hit by an outage Tuesday that knocked several major websites offline for global users.
Many sites came back online within a few hours. By 9:57 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it had fixed the problem.
X, ChatGPT, Shopify, Indeed, Truth Social, and Claude were among the affected sites. Some NJ Transit digital services also went down.
The Cause
Cloudflare said the problem started with a configuration file used to manage threat traffic. The file "grew beyond an expected size of entries." That triggered a crash in the software system.
The company started seeing unusual traffic around 5:20 a.m. ET.
There's no evidence of an attack or malicious activity, Cloudflare said.
The Apology
"Given the importance of Cloudflare's services, any outage is unacceptable," a spokesperson said. "We apologize to our customers and the internet in general for letting you down today."
Cloudflare helps manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the web. The company guards against distributed denial of service attacks.
The Market Impact
Cloudflare shares fell more than 2%.
Recent Context
The issue comes less than a month after Amazon Web Services suffered a daylong disruption. Microsoft's Azure cloud and 365 services also had a global outage recently.
In July 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike software upgrade caused a massive outage. It temporarily halted flights, impacted financial services, and pushed hospitals to delay procedures.
The Bottom Line
Cloudflare's outage took down major sites for hours due to a configuration file that grew too large, highlighting how internet infrastructure companies serving 20% of the web can cause widespread disruption when things go wrong.
