Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike

About 20 percent of the web relies on Cloudflare to manage and protect traffic, a Cloudflare blog noted in July. Some intermediate fixes have been made, Cloudflare’s status page said. But as of this writing, many sites remain down. According to DownDetector, Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure also experienced outages.

“Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable,” Cloudflare’s spokesperson said. “We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

Cloudflare will continue to update the status page as fixes come in, and a blog will be posted later today discussing the issue, the spokesperson told Ars.

It’s the latest massive outage site owners have coped with after an Amazon Web Services outage took out half the web last month. Both the AWS outage and the chaotic CrowdStrike outage last year were estimated to cost affected parties billions.

Critics have suggested that outages like these make it clear 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 caused some investors to panic, as Cloudflare’s stock fell about 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.