Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure provider, has confirmed that it has restored services following a major outage on Friday morning. The Cloudflare outage impacted several well-known websites, including Zoom, LinkedIn, and others, causing widespread connectivity issues across the globe. This is the second significant outage for Cloudflare in less than three weeks.
Cloudflare explained that the outage was caused by an issue related to its firewall configuration. A change to how the firewall handled requests caused the company’s network to become unavailable for several minutes. The company clarified that the incident was not due to any cyberattack.
Cause of the Cloudflare Outage
- Cloudflare identified the problem as stemming from a database change during planned maintenance.
- The database change “overloaded their systems,” leading to the disruption, according to Richard Ford, Chief Technology Officer at Integrity360.
- The company is investigating problems with its Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs, which are responsible for communication between software systems.
Cybersecurity experts stated that it usually takes time to identify the exact cause of such outages, but the initial findings suggest a technical malfunction during a routine update. Edinburgh airport briefly shut down during the outage but later clarified that the disruption was unrelated to Cloudflare.
Previous Incidents and Growing Concerns
This Cloudflare outage follows a similar incident in November, when users of ChatGPT, League of Legends, and other platforms were affected. Additionally, last month, Microsoft had to address an issue with its Azure cloud portal, leaving services like Office 365 and Minecraft inaccessible.
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Cybersecurity experts warn that such outages may become more frequent as businesses rely more heavily on cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare. These disruptions highlight the growing complexity and risk of cloud infrastructure failures as global operations scale.
The frequency of these outages raises concerns about the reliance on a few major players for internet infrastructure, with experts expecting more such incidents in the future.
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