Many internet services disrupted after Cloudflare warns of service issues

Many popular internet services experienced slowdowns and outages Tuesday morning, with the major web infrastructure company Cloudflare saying a bug led to broad problems on its network.

Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, said just before 7 a.m. that it had begun investigating the issue. DownDetector.com, a website that tracks service outages based on user reports, noted that X, Spotify, OpenAI and Amazon Web Services all appeared to be slowed by the outage.

The company said at 9:42 a.m. that it believed the issue had been resolved.

Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's chief technology officer, apologized on X for the outages.

"I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us," Knecht said.

The root cause was a bug in Cloudflare's service to combat bots, he said. As the company made routine updates, the issue cascaded and caused a massive crash to its web hosting services.

During the outages, some affected websites displayed "internal server error" warnings. Others said, "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."

Cloudflare said around 7:30 a.m. said the company was starting to see some services recover but that customers may still "observe higher-than-normal error rates."

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Just after 8 a.m., Cloudflare said the issue had been identified and was in the process of being fixed.

Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that monitors internet networks, said he saw no evidence that the outage was a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which a hacker slows or stops a website from loading by flooding it with traffic.

Such an attack against Cloudflare would be surprising, he said, as it's a leading DDoS prevention service.

New York City Emergency Management said Tuesday morning it was aware of reports that services provided by Cloudflare were affected and added that it was monitoring any major disruptions to the city's services. At the time of the statement, "no significant resource requests have been made."

The outage comes on the heels of another major internet service outage that took down large swaths of the internet for an unusually long period. In October, an Amazon Web Services outage affected many apps, websites and online services for hours, disrupting everything from Snapchat to Medicare enrollment.