The ongoing outage is the third major disruption to hit a popular internet service provider since mid-October, after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
IT services provider Cloudflare is experiencing a technical problem that has disrupted numerous popular websites and online services, including social media platform X and AI giant OpenAI.
The disruption, which Cloudflare acknowledged as “an internal service degradation”, was first observed at approximately 11.30am this morning (18 November).
Reports of disruptions to the sites and services of companies such as X, OpenAI and Spotify, as well as popular video game League of Legends and betting service Bet365, started cropping up on popular disruptions reporting platform DownDetector around this time – with thousands of users logging reports. The series of unconnected sites and services are all linked by their usage of Cloudflare in their online operations.
DownDetector itself also seemed to be affected, with intermittent instances of downtime being observed on the reporting platform.
Affected sites have been observed displaying the error message “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” when users attempt access, as well as impassable loading issues hitting users on Cloudflare’s human verification pages that often appear on popular websites.
Cloudflare – which recently announced its acquisition of Replicate – first reported its investigation of the outage at 11.48am, and has been updating its system status page regularly since then.
The popular content delivery network and security provider claimed to identify the source of the outage at 1.09pm and said in a recent update that Cloudflare Access and Warp services had recovered, and that it is working to restore the rest of its services. As of time of reporting, the outage is still ongoing.
Cloudflare previously experienced another major global outage in 2019. While the source of today’s disruption has not yet been identified, the 2019 outage was attributed to “a massive spike in CPU”.
Internet issues
Today’s outage is the third major web service disruption in recent months, after significant outages hit Amazon Web Services last month shortly followed by a similar disruption to Microsoft Azure.
The severity of these global outages has led to increased discussion of the overreliance that comes with centralised web service providers and monopolies.
“The trouble with big centralised systems – be it Microsoft Azure, AWS, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack or Zoom – is that they suffer global outages because they have single points of failure,” Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element, told SiliconRepublic.com at the time of the Azure outage. “True resilience comes from decentralisation and self-hosting.”
The incidents – which affected US-headquartered companies – also incited discussions of the importance of digital sovereignty.
“When incidents like this happen, digital sovereignty means having control, and right now, too much of ours is outsourced,” said Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider Civo, at the time of the Azure outage.
“A single configuration error outside our borders shouldn’t be able to ground flights at Heathrow or disrupt parliamentary systems in Scotland.”
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