For the second time this year, Cloudflare has faced major problems – this time after what the company said was an “abnormal increase in traffic” that disrupted a wide range of the platform.
If you’re not familiar with Cloudflare, you’re not alone. Often described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” Cloudflare manages and protects traffic for approximately 20 percent of the web.
Cause of Cloudflare outage revealed: This is what happened.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is an Internet infrastructure and cloud computing provider that operates similar to Amazon Web Services. The company hosts many online services, but is best known as a global content delivery network, which speeds up websites by routing them through servers located closer to users. In practice, Cloudflare acts as a giant Internet middleman – the thing that makes a US-hosted site load faster, even if you’re browsing from half a world away.
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Cloudflare has servers everywhere, and they can cache large amounts of content. This allows the company to spread traffic across thousands of nodes – individual servers in Cloudflare’s global network – with each able to handle high volumes of requests on its own without returning everything to the origin server. This prevents sites from being blocked simultaneously and reduces the possibility of overload.
Your local Cloudflare node is also almost always several hops closer to the server where the site is actually hosted. A hop is just one step in the journey your data takes through the Internet. Fewer hops means shorter distances and less time for information to travel between points. That shorter path translates to lower latency and faster overall load times.
Because Cloudflare’s software underpins so many businesses, disruptions like this have a significant impact. Tuesday’s disruption spread across the web, causing services including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, social platform X, and even digital tools for NJ Transit to shut down or slow down.