Cloudflare blames massive internet outage on ‘latent glitch’

On Tuesday morning, much of the internet was down or not working properly, including ChatGPT, Cloud, Spotify, X, and more due to an outage at internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.

Cloudflare said on its status page at around 8 a.m. ET that it had identified the issues and was implementing a fix. Less than two hours later, Cloudflare said: “The fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We continue to monitor errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Around the same time, Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, explained that a latent error was responsible for X’s apologetic post.

“In short, an underlying bug in the service that supports our ability to mitigate botnets began to crash after a routine configuration change we made. This led to widespread degradation of our network and other services,” Knecht wrote, referring to a bug that was not caught in testing and did not cause any failures.

Knecht also said Cloudflare let down its customers and “the broader internet” with the outage, and promised the company was already working to make sure “it doesn’t happen again.”

“I know it caused real pain today,” Knecht added, promising a more in-depth analysis of what happened “in a few hours.”

The company has since noted on its status page that some customers may still be having issues logging in or using the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare said it is working to resolve this issue, and continues to monitor any other issues.

Cloudflare’s massive outage came less than a month after a similar outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is another stark reminder that the entire web depends on just a few companies. If these giants encounter a problem, the entire Internet begins to collapse.

According to estimates, Cloudflare is used by 20% of all websites on the Internet. The company says it has data centers in 330 cities, and 13,000 networks “that connect directly to Cloudflare, including all major ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises.” One of the main services Cloudflare offers to customers is protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which are designed to take websites offline, making Tuesday’s outage somewhat ironic.