Issues with Cloudflare, one of the Internet’s major infrastructure providers, caused massive outages Tuesday morning as people on the East Coast were logging in for work. Now we are starting to get answers as to why this happened.
Cloudflare emailed a statement to Mashable, suggesting the unusual, heavy traffic was attributed to its services. The company has not yet said whether the unusual traffic appears to be of a nefarious nature.
Read Cloudflare’s statement:
mashable light speed
“We observed an abnormal traffic increase to one of Cloudflare’s services starting at 11:20 UTC. This caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. We do not yet know the cause of the abnormal traffic increase. We are prepared to ensure that all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will focus our attention on investigating the cause of the abnormal increase in traffic. We Will post updates on cloudflarestatus.com. More in-depth analysis when it’s ready for blog.cloudflare.com,
It seems that the unusual traffic increase caused the massive issues on Tuesday. The list of services that experienced the outage was huge, but it appears to include heavy hitters like OpenAI, X, Grindr, and many others. Almost anyone with an Internet connection will be affected by the Cloudflare outage. As we approached 10 a.m. ET, issues reported by users on Downdetector continued to increase, indicating that issues persist. (Disclosure: DownDetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable.)
“We have implemented a change that has restored dashboard services. We are still working to fix the impact to broader application services,” read the latest update on Cloudflare’s status page.
Like the recent AWS outage, Cloudflare is one of the major pillars of the internet. When it goes down, the downstream effects are severe and widespread – as we are seeing on Tuesday.