Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday, causing hundreds of websites to crash, including the X platform, Spotify, Knava, ChatGPT, most Egyptian news sites, and other major platforms.
Cloudflare is a leading provider of IT infrastructure and security for many high-traffic online services.
The incident was so widespread that the Downdetector outage tracking service was temporarily affected by the same technical issues before it was able to resume operations, and it recorded a sharp increase in user reports worldwide.
This left many websites inaccessible for approximately three hours.
What is Cloudflare?
According to The Guardian, Cloudflare is a global company specializing in cloud computing and cybersecurity services.
The company provides data centers, website and email security, data loss protection, cybersecurity defenses, and more.
It describes itself as providing an “impregnable internet,” thanks to its services that connect its customers to the outside world and block billions of cyber threats daily.
It also uses its global infrastructure to accelerate internet traffic.
The company generates over US$500 million (£440 million) in revenue quarterly from approximately 300,000 customers operating in 125 countries, including China.
It is one of several companies that together form the backbone of the internet’s nervous system, so when its services go down, websites can effectively stop working, affecting millions of people and businesses.
By one estimate, Cloudflare provides services to one in five websites worldwide.
Why did something go wrong?
Cloudflare described the issue as an “internal service degradation.” It took less than three hours from announcing an investigation to announcing a fix.
There may have been a specific link to services in London, as the company stated it had to disable an encryption service in the British capital while attempting to resolve the outage.
Cloudflare added that there had been an unusual spike in traffic on one of its services starting this morning, but the cause was still unknown.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
