Cloudflare goes down again, causing disruptions across major platforms

Cloudflare, which calls its platform an 'immune system for the internet', is a global cloud services and cybersecurity provider with clients spanning across 125 countries

Cloudflare, which protects millions of websites from malicious attacks, was down again for a brief period on Friday, disrupting many other platforms like Zerodha, Groww, Canva, Downdetector, etc.

 

The platform, however, said the outage was caused by a technical change it made to its web application firewall and clarified that it was not an attack.

 

"A change made to how Cloudflare's web application firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare's network at approximately 8.47 GMT and concluded approximately 9.13 GMT. This was not an attack. the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share full details in a blog post today," Cloudflare sent in a statement sent to Business Standard.

 

This is the second outage faced by Cloudflare in less than a month. The last outage occured on November 18, affecting platforms like ChatGPT and Elon Musk's X. 

 

It stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file designed to manage potential security risks, Reuters reported. The file became excessively large, overwhelming, and crashed the software responsible for handling traffic across several Cloudflare services. “No evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the company had said.

 

Not long before that, other major cloud providers, including Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, reported similar outages. Together with Google Cloud, these three companies account for nearly two-thirds of the infrastructure that underpins the digital ecosystem.

 

Cloudflare, a global provider of cloud services and cybersecurity, offers data centres, website and email protection, data loss prevention, and defences against cyber threats. 

 

The company calls its platform an "immune system for the internet", using technology that sits between clients and external traffic to block billions of threats each day. Its worldwide infrastructure is also employed to accelerate internet traffic.

 

The company earns over $500 million in quarterly revenue from close to 300,000 customers spanning 125 countries.