Cloudflare Restores Service After Morning Outage Affecting Major Websites
MADRID — Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure firm, announced on Friday that it has restored its services following a morning outage that impacted numerous global websites, including LinkedIn and Zoom. This incident marks the second outage the company has faced in less than three weeks.
The company clarified that the issue has been resolved and confirmed it was not due to any cyberattack. They noted that Cloudflare’s network was down for several minutes due to a change in how its firewall processes requests.
Furthermore, they are looking into problems related to the Cloudflare dashboard and associated APIs, which facilitate communication between different software systems.
Experts in cybersecurity noted that it usually takes time to pinpoint the exact cause of such failures. However, according to Richard Ford, the chief technology officer at Integrity360, an issue related to a database change carried out during scheduled maintenance was responsible for Friday’s incident. It “effectively overloaded the system,” he explained.
In a related note, Edinburgh Airport briefly closed on Friday morning but later stated that the outage was a localized issue unrelated to Cloudflare.
Back in November, a significant three-hour outage from Cloudflare affected various services, from ChatGPT to the New Jersey Transit System.
Additionally, last month, Microsoft had to issue a patch for a problem in its Azure cloud services that hindered access to Office 365 and other platforms. They attributed this to a configuration change in their infrastructure.
Amazon also faced a significant outage of its cloud computing services in October.
Richard Ford mentioned that such incidents are likely to become more common as organizations increasingly rely on fewer service providers, raising the complexity and scale of their operations with platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare.
This report has been updated to clarify that the temporary closure of Edinburgh Airport was not linked to the Cloudflare outage.
