The Cloudflare blog noted in July that about 20 percent of the web relies on Cloudflare to manage and secure traffic. Cloudflare’s status page states that some intermediate fixes have been made. But as of this writing, many sites are down. Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber and Azure also suffered outages, according to Downdetector.
“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” a Cloudflare spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for disappointing you today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”
The spokesperson told Ars that Cloudflare will continue to update the status page as fixes arrive and will have a blog posted later today discussing the issue.
It is the latest large-scale outage that site owners have suffered after half the web was down following an Amazon Web Services outage last month. Both the AWS outage and the chaotic CrowdStrike outage last year were estimated to have cost affected parties billions in losses.
Critics have suggested that such outages highlight how fragile the Internet really is, especially when everyone relies on the same service providers. During the AWS outage, some sites considered diversifying service providers to avoid losing business during future outages.
The outage may have spooked some investors, as Cloudflare’s stock fell nearly 3 percent amid the widespread outage.
Ars will update this story when Cloudflare provides more information on the outage.
This story was updated on November 18 to add new information from Cloudflare.