Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Internet

Cloudflare Outage Knocks Many Popular Websites Offline 56

Posted by msmash from the internet-outage dept.
An outage at Cloudflare that began moments ago has knocked many popular websites, including ChatGPT and X, according to user reports. Cloudflare says on its website: "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available."

Update: In a statement after the outage was resolved, Cloudflare CTO said: 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. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.

Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack.

That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Cloudflare Outage Knocks Many Popular Websites Offline More

Cloudflare Outage Knocks Many Popular Websites Offline

Comments Filter:

  • Having trouble with Slashdot too (Score:3)

    by ranton ( 36917 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @08:12AM (#65802389)

    I just had trouble looking at a comment on one of my posts yesterday because I can't get through the Cloudflare bot detector. I'm not sure why that is only used when looking at my comment history. It's funny that I first have that problem this morning on Slashdot just to see this story at the top of my news feed on the same site.

  • Step aside, US-1-East, there's another single point of failure to the internet!

    (seriously though, have a fallback CDN. Much less effort than multi-cloud)

  • They have scheduled maintenance notices at several data centres that seem to coincide with the outage... coincidence or yet another self inflicted configuration screw up?

  • Too many eggs... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @08:46AM (#65802445)

    ... not enough baskets. Not the only place in tech where this is going massively wrong.

    • Time to run the cleaning ferret through the tubes again...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Even worse: Most of the end-user computers run just one OS and most of the Mobile devices do so too. Ideal conditions for an internet worm to take over everything within a few hours. Houses of cards standing on sand in a location with frequent strong winds ...

        Well, the human race will eventually learn a lesson here. Maybe it will be a tiny bit mire careful afterwards. Or not.

  • I tried to reload page opened yesterday and was greeted by bilingual message "Your security is our top priority. To continue on to our website, please check the box below." It lasted for a while but it looks like now access to Website is working. What a nasty piece of software.

  • ...and the error page helpfully provides a link to Cloudflare's site for more information...which is also unavailable

  • That explains it (Score:3)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @09:29AM (#65802513) Journal

    I was wondering why a site I was on this morning decided to stop loading. Since other sites were still working I thought it might be the site itself. The hamsters got too tired and took a nap.

  • Touch dirt (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jbarr ( 2233 )

    Seriously, that we have become so reliant on 100% 24x7x365 connectivity is chilling.

  • Let's get the whole internet to us Cloudflare (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LondoMollari ( 172563 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @09:49AM (#65802555) Homepage

    If all of the most popular websites use Cloudflare now the world's best hackers only have to take out one service instead of many.

  • X?! (Score:1)

    by trollboy ( 46578 )

    Didn't musk brag about cancelling cloudflare?

  • You can tell that the next giant solar flare is going to flatten this whole house of cards.

  • we need a downdetectordown site

  • Those issue takes time to for the fix to propogate.

  • This radio ad from GTA 5 [youtube.com] sums it up perfectly:

    The future is now!
    The future is in the cloud!
    Cloud computing!

    GIRL: what's cloud computing?

    Imagine a computer you share with everyone
    imagine your private data spread around the world
    being shared equally with everyone
    it's the cloud

    GIRL: I'm in the cloud!

    It's utopia
    nothing can possibly go wrong
    imagine instead of your own computer
    it's a giant one we all share together
    your data is safe
    it's in the cloud!

    GIRL: Everyone is in the cloud!

    Live life lsurrounded by the mists

  • # fortune
    You attempt things you do not plan because of your extreme stupidity.
    # _

  • At least with Cloudflare, you know that there's going to be a thorough RCA and then post-mortem will be public. They might have gotten too big and too much of the internet is dependent on them, but the reasons why they got that big are pretty clear. There should be more competitors paying attention and emulating, as they do a lot right and having more people be open about good engineering would make for a healthy and more competitive space.
    • It would work a lot better if Cloudflare and any competitors would adopt a model that allows companies to easily use any of their services and rather than subscribing to one company's service to implement a pay-as-you-go option. That way if Cloudflare gets hit websites can flip to using something else on a temporary basis. Companies could even load balance across the different services so that all of them are always getting a little bit of use. This isn't particularly good for any one company (who would muc

      • If you pay cloudflare you don't have to use their NS. You could have removed their proxy service. Use akamai whilst they're down. Problem was eggs in free basket for most people.

  • Routine configuration change... never happen again - where i have read this formula before or it a copy paste of the PA when this happened last time? hmm
  • If AWS had outages this often, people would switch to Azure or other competitors very quickly....perhaps it's time to do so for Cloudflare? You hire them for reliability, nothing else. An unreliable CDN is like a chair with unreliable legs. What's the point?

Slashdot Top Deals

Dynamically binding, you realize the magic. Statically binding, you see only the hierarchy.

Close