Companies like OpenAI, Spotify and X (formerly Twitter) experienced online outages this morning due to a disruption at Cloudflare, the web infrastructure firm used by roughly one-fifth of all websites globally. The outage, which began around 5:20 ET today (Nov. 18) and was resolved four hours later, is the latest incident underscoring the fragility of the systems underpinning the internet.
Cloudflare said in a statement that the disruption stemmed from a file that “grew beyond an unexpected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system.” The company added that there is currently no evidence of an attack or malicious activity and reassured customers that services would gradually return to normal throughout the day.
Cloudflare first addressed the issue on its system status page, where it reported an “internal service degradation” this morning. By about 9:40 ET, the company said it had implemented a fix. The outage prompted more than 11,000 reports filed at DownDetector, a platform that tracks online service disruptions.
What is Cloudflare?
Headquartered in San Francisco, Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn. Originally conceived from a project aimed at tracking the sources of email spam, Cloudflare has since evolved into a cloud and cybersecurity provider that manages internet traffic and blocks malicious attacks. The company, which counts about 35 percent of the Fortune 500 among its millions of customers, is also known for maintaining a wall of over 100 lava lamps at its headquarters that are used to generate random data for encryption keys.
The outage follows last year’s historic disruption at CrowdStrike, when a software update from the Texas-based firm triggered a wide-scale outage that temporarily erased $30 billion from its market cap. The incident, dubbed the “largest IT outage in history,” hit the health care and banking sectors particularly hard, with each estimated to have lost upwards of ten figures.
More recent outages have added to the strain. In October, a bug in Amazon Web Services’ automation software disrupted the thousands of companies, including Signal, Snapchat and Duolingo. Just days later, Microsoft’s Azure experienced a similar incident after a configuration change caused an outage that affected customers ranging from Alaska Airlines to Vodafone.
These events have highlighted how the consolidation of internet services can amplify the impact of any single disruption. AWS controls roughly 32 percent of the cloud provider market, with Azure close behind at 23 percent. Cloudflare, meanwhile, supports around 20 percent of the global web.
Cloudflare pledged to do better going forward. “Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” said the company. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today.”
