Cloudflare suffered a major outage earlier today that knocked offline major websites including X (Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and even DownDetector.
Users attempting to access affected sites encountered error messages reading, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
The disruption stemmed from a hidden bug in Cloudflare’s bot mitigation system that began crashing after engineers made a routine configuration change.
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht acknowledged the company “failed” its customers and clarified the outage wasn’t the result of an attack.
Cloudflare deployed a fix around 5:42 PM local time, with dashboard services coming back online shortly before that. Recovery occurred in stages as the company worked to restore full functionality across its network.
It’s worth noting that this marks the third major infrastructure outage in under a month. Amazon Web Services experienced a crash that disrupted Snapchat, Pinterest, Signal, Zoom, and Slack, among others, causing problems for airports and online banking.
AWS later determined the cause was a bug that prevented automatic repairs from working as they should. Microsoft Azure followed with its own outage a week later, primarily affecting Microsoft’s own products like Microsoft 365 and Xbox.
Cloudflare’s core business involves protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where malicious actors attempt to overwhelm sites with traffic. The company recently blocked what it described as the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.
The irony wasn’t lost on observers that a company specializing in keeping websites online was responsible for taking down a large portion of the internet due to an internal systems failure.
