(Nov 18): A worldwide outage plaguing the network of cybersecurity firm Cloudflare Inc has taken down the websites for everything from the chief US energy regulator, ChatGPT, the New Jersey transit authority and the social-media platform X.
While Cloudflare said Tuesday that it was working to restore services and was “seeing services recover,” countless websites remained down, including that of the bond grader and financial data provider Moody’s Corp.
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the company observed a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of its services around 6:20am ET, causing some traffic passing through its network to experience errors.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson added. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Cloudflare shares were down 4% in pre-market trading.
The company has experienced several outages over the past few years.
See also: Databricks seeks US$130 bil valuation, The Information reports
In July 2019, a bug in Cloudflare’s software caused one part of its network to suck up computing resources, leading thousands of websites including that of Discord, Shopify Inc, SoundCloud and Coinbase around the world to go offline for as long as 30 minutes. In June 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of its data centres, also essentially shutting down major websites and services in an incident that lasted about an hour and a half.
Cloudflare’s software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies globally, acting as a buffer between their websites and end users and working to protect their sites from attacks that might overload them with traffic.
Last year, a faulty software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc crashed millions of devices operating on Microsoft Corp’s Windows systems, disrupting a wide range of industries, including air travel, banks and healthcare.
See also: Xiaomi turns into worst-performing Chinese tech stock on EV doubts
The outage is the latest example of the internet’s reliance on “relatively few players,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at University of Surrey, said, while describing Cloudflare as the “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.”
Anthropic PBC said its Claude AI chatbot was affected on Tuesday.
The website for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees US electricity markets, utilities, power traders and other energy-related matters, was also down. A host of companies, attorneys and regulators depend on the site to access regulatory cases and filings.
The websites of global food and agricultural giants including Cargill Inc and Louis Dreyfus Co were both down as of about 9am New York time due to the Cloudflare outage.
“People have no choice but to depend on relatively few big names,” said Woodward.
In a notice sent just after 8am New York time, New Jersey Transit said both its website and its mobile app were affected by the Cloudflare outage and warned that services may be temporarily unavailable or slow. New Jersey Transit tickets were still being collected, according to spokesman Jim Smith.
“Our teams are monitoring the situation closely and will restore full functionality as soon as the vendor implements a fix,” he said.
Uploaded by Magessan Varatharaja
