A web infrastructure company says it has fully restored services after a “latent bug” sent major platforms, including X, ChatGPT and Canva, into a tailspin.<\/p>\n
Cloudflare said it has started to investigate the outage and has deployed a fix.<\/p>\n
“We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” the US company said.<\/p>\n
Here’s what we know.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Websites couldn’t properly load due to the Cloudflare outage. (AFP: Jaap Arriens)<\/p>\n
When did the Cloudflare outage begin?<\/p>\n
The outage began on Tuesday about 6:30am, local time \u2014 10:30pm AEDT.<\/p>\n
Users noticed error messages flashing up across websites, with some site owners unable to access their own performance dashboards.<\/p>\n
At 12:44pm, local time, Cloudflare said its engineers were no longer seeing some of the issues plaguing its customers, but that it was continuing to monitor for any further problems.<\/p>\n
What caused the outage?<\/p>\n
Cloudflare says the problem was triggered by an automatically generated “configuration file”, which is designed to manage potential security threats.<\/p>\n
How Facebook went dark<\/a><\/p>\n The outage that took down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for about six hours, affecting billions of people around the world, may have been due to a tiny human error.<\/p>\n This file “grew too large” and crashed the software system that handles traffic for several Cloudflare services.<\/p>\n Cloudflare said there was “no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity”.<\/p>\n “Earlier today, we failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” chief technology officer Dane Knecht wrote on X.<\/p>\n “In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made.”<\/p>\n The company said earlier there had been “a spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services.<\/p>\n What services were affected?<\/p>\n The latest Cloudflare outage prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT.<\/p>\n Other impacted platforms included Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase and even the online game League of Legends.<\/p>\n The Moody’s credit ratings service website displayed an Error Code 500 and told people to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.<\/p>\n New Jersey Transit and New York City Emergency Management also reported issues.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, France’s national railway company SNCF announced its website had been affected, meaning some information and schedules may not be up to date.<\/p>\n ChatGPT was one of the platforms impacted by the outage. (ABC News: Luke Bowden)<\/p>\n Many users logged outage reports with Downdetector, peaking at more than 11,000 reports before dropping to about 2,800 hours later.<\/p>\n But the actual number of impacted users is unknown.<\/p>\n What is Cloudflare?<\/p>\n Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” based in San Francisco.<\/p>\n In addition to handling around a fifth of global web traffic, it touches a third of the world’s top websites \u2014 powering retailers such as Shopify and AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as smartphone apps and streaming services.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, it works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer by protecting platforms from traffic surges and cyber attacks.<\/p>\n While most people imagine there is a direct line between their digital device and websites, companies like Cloudflare actually sit in the middle.<\/p>\n Cloudflare is a “content delivery network” based in San Francisco. (Reuters: Yves Herman)<\/p>\n It means when problems flare up, it triggers a “massive digital gridlock” for internet users, according to cybersecurity expert Mike Chapple.<\/p>\n “When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site,” he said.<\/p>\n “Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server, which might be very close to your home.<\/p>\n “That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response.<\/p>\n “It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20 per cent of the internet goes down at the same time.” Experts say Cloudflare outages can lead to ‘massive digital gridlocks’. (AP: Eric Risberg)<\/p>\n What could prevent future outages?<\/p>\n This latest incident shows how reliant “very important” internet-based services are on a relatively small pool of major players, according to University of Surrey cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward.<\/p>\n “It’s a double-edged sword as these service providers need to be large to provide the scale and global reach required by big brands,” he said.<\/p>\n “But when they fail the impact can be significant.”<\/p>\n Amazon cloud unit outage impacts hundreds of platforms<\/a><\/p>\n Amazon’s cloud unit AWS has experienced a major global services outage that also disrupted hundreds of other platforms.<\/p>\n Niusha Shafiabady, a computational intelligence expert from Australian Catholic University, said more could be done to prevent future Cloudflare failures.<\/p>\n “This is a wakeup call,” she said.<\/p>\n “We need transparency, backup routes and multi\u2011provider set-ups so one company’s glitch can’t darken the whole web.”<\/p>\n This is the latest in a trend of infrastructure providers going offline and taking swaths of the internet with them, according to Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.<\/p>\n Amazon <\/a>and Microsoft<\/a> cloud services were hit by failures last month.<\/p>\n “We’re seeing outages happen more frequently, and they’re taking longer to fix,” Mr Bourne said.<\/p>\n “That’s a symptom of strained infrastructure: increased AI load, streaming demand, and ageing capacity all pushing systems past the edge.”<\/p>\n ABC\/Wires<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A web infrastructure company says it has fully restored services after a “latent bug” sent major platforms, including…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2574,64,63,99,8417,5004,15859,137740,16536,20582,1996],"class_list":["post-294148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-amazon","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-canva","tag-chatgpt","tag-cloudflare","tag-downdetector","tag-nbn","tag-outage","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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