SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Global websites reliant on Cloudflare’s infrastructure experienced disruptions on Friday, marking the second such significant outage in less than three weeks for the internet services company. Cloudflare, however, swiftly implemented a fix for the issue affecting its dashboard and related applications.
The company’s shares initially fell by as much as 4.5% in premarket trading as reports of the widespread downtime began to emerge. Following the announcement of the resolution, the shares pared some of these losses, last trading about 2% lower.
The incident, which saw users reporting a sharp uptick in problems around 9:16 a.m. London time, impacted a diverse array of global platforms.
Websites that appeared to be affected included:
- Professional networking site LinkedIn
- Digital currency exchange Coinbase
- Online publishing platform Substack
- E-commerce giant Shopify
- Banking firm HSBC
- Food delivery service Deliveroo
Outage monitoring site Downdetector itself experienced brief service interruptions, but noted that user reports sharply declined after Cloudflare initiated its correction.
Quick fix follows immediate investigation
Cloudflare confirmed that it was investigating the issue and, minutes later, provided an update that service was being restored.
The company issued an update minutes later saying it had “implemented a fix” and was watching for results.
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The repeated disruptions underscore the critical nature of Cloudflare’s services, which are utilized by countless businesses globally to manage and secure traffic for roughly 20% of the entire web.
Cloudflare’s core offerings include guarding against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where malicious actors attempt to overwhelm systems with traffic.
The timing of the crash is particularly sensitive, coming less than three weeks after a similar incident that caused widespread error messages across the internet, which the company had described at the time as “unacceptable.”
