Cloudflare Bug Causes Widespread Internet Outage; Services Restored Again.
A serious Cloudflare service outage happened on Tuesday, November 18, causing huge numbers of 500 errors and access issues for many major websites and applications, including X, ChatGPT, and Canva. A fix has since been put into place by the company, restoring the service.
Official Cause Silent Bug, Not an Attack
The part of Cloudflare that concentrated on the services offered to mitigate bots revealed by its CTO, Dane Knecht, that an obsolete bug found in any of its services has caused the event. He added that, following the ordinary configuration changes, this service "crashed and cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services".
Knecht emphasized that this is "not an attack," and indicated that work had already begun to ensure that this does not recur.
He further offered a direct apology, stating, "I won't mince words 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... I apologize for the impact that we caused."
Definitely, Global Disruption
The outage was felt across the entire globe. Downdetector logged over 2.1 million reports of connectivity failure, more than 453,000 of which were from the USA.
Users reported issues affecting a plethora of platforms, including:
- Canva
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Doordash
- Grindr
- Indeed
- Letterboxd
- Truth Social
- Uber
- X
- Zoom
OpenAI has acknowledged the issues experienced by ChatGPT, its APIs, and Sora on its status page, attributing it instead to "an issue with one of our third-party service providers."
Timeline of the Outage and Reinstatement
Join those who reported on Downdetector issues almost 15 minutes after 6 a.m. in Eastern Time. Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the issue right after this.
By 8:10 a.m. EST, it was announced that a 'fix is being implemented,' with the company monitoring errors. Outage reports escalated even after this due to users logging in.
At 9:50 a.m. EST, Cloudflare indicated that the fix was fully implemented, and the event was believed to be ended, restoring normalcy to services.
