What the Tech: Cloudflare shutdown
If you woke up this morning and it felt like the internet was broken, you weren’t imagining it. Cloudflare, one of the major players in internet infrastructure, suffered a massive outage early today, leaving millions of websites, including giants like ChatGPT, X, and PayPal, temporarily inaccessible.
So, what exactly happened, and why does one company have such a huge impact on the World Wide Web? The Hidden Engines of the Internet
Most of us view the internet as a collection of websites and apps. But behind the scenes, a handful of companies are the backbone, keeping the whole system running. When one of these companies experiences trouble, the disruption is felt by everyone.
Cloudflare is one of the biggest and most critical of these entities. It serves two main functions: protecting websites from malicious attacks and speeding up how quickly they load for users.
This morning, the company reported that a sudden surge in traffic caused parts of its network to fail. As a result, users attempting to access major sites were met with error messages. Trying to log into a site like ChatGPT, for instance, triggered the familiar pop-up asking to verify you’re human, a Cloudflare service, which was then unable to complete its check. When that critical system failed, websites could not load at all. Even outage tracker DownDetector went down for a spell, and when it returned, its front page was filled almost entirely with fresh outage reports. What Caused the Spike?
This massive slowdown happened just as people around the world were waking up and logging on, a predictable surge in activity for a company as large as Cloudflare. So, what was the root cause of a spike that even they couldn’t handle?
Some tech experts were quick to wonder if the surge in activity might be related to a dDos, or a denial service attack, when hackers overpower web servers with “junk”, causing the systems to shut down.
According to Cloudflare, early evidence points to a configuration error within their systems, not a confirmed cyber attack. The company stresses it will continue to investigate.
This incident serves as a powerful reminder of how much the internet relies on just a dozen or so massive infrastructure companies to stay online. And it shows how quickly things can fall apart when just one of them hiccups.
This is actually the third major outage from a critical infrastructure company in the past three years. Last summer, a software update at CloudStrike caused millions of Windows computers worldwide to crash, grounding flights and shutting down vital systems for hours.
