Following widespread outages at AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, Cloudflare has grow to be the newest platform to go offline.
Guests to main websites together with X and Letterboxd had been met with a 500 inner error web page earlier in the present day, with Information Centre Evaluation additionally being impacted by the outage. Cloudlfare has but to element precisely what prompted the outage, though it impacted third-party web sites, in addition to Cloudflare’s personal dashboard and API options.
Cloudflare, which offers web infrastructure used to maintain web sites on-line and mitigate cyber assaults, acknowledged the disruption, though recovered faster than AWS’ outage earlier this 12 months. “We’re seeing companies get better, however prospects could proceed to look at higher-than-normal error charges as we proceed remediation efforts,” the corporate mentioned in an replace at 12:21pm. In the course of the writing of this text, the Information Centre Evaluation web site has been up and down like a yo-yo.
Paradoxically, Down Detector, the monitoring web site that screens outages, additionally struggled to load throughout the incident. When obtainable, it confirmed a pointy spike in drawback stories tied to affected companies.
Cloudflare’s applied sciences sit in entrance of many widespread websites to deal with heavy visitors and shield in opposition to malicious exercise, which means points on the supplier can ripple throughout a broad swathe of the web. The reason for the issue was not instantly clear on the time of writing.
It’s simply the newest in a protracted line of high-profile outages lately. The AWS outage earlier this 12 months was significantly important given it impacted greater than 1,000 of probably the most visited websites – together with Reddit, Amazon itself, Snapchat, and even HMRC within the UK.
Regardless of the excessive profile of a few of these outages, the Uptime Institute’s 2025 Annual Outage Evaluation confirmed that total outage frequency and severity are literally declining year-on-year. The issue comes when there’s an outage that impacts one of many main hyperscalers – equivalent to AWS or Microsoft’s Azure – with 1000’s of companies now reliant on these hyperscalers to stay on-line, the influence of that outage is widespread.
That signifies that whereas the variety of outages total is definitely reducing, the precise ‘blast radius’ of every outage is usually bigger. It additionally doesn’t assist that many of those outages have been clustered collectively – in spite of everything, AWS went down on October 19, Azure October 29, and now Cloudflare on November 18.
