Cloudflare fixes global outage: what we know
18 November 17:54
Cloudflare, one of the main providers of Internet security and cloud networks, has announced that it has successfully resolved a large-scale global outage that affected hundreds of popular web services around the world, including key social networks and artificial intelligence tools, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
The company reported that the incident was localized and fixed within a few hours, but experts continue to monitor the situation to ensure that all systems are fully restored.
What is known about the outage
The outage began today, November 18, at around 14:00 Kyiv time. Users started reporting connection errors and website inaccessibility in large numbers.
- 14:00: Cloudflare reports “service degradation” and launches an investigation.
- 15:00: The company’s specialists identified the source of the problem and began work to fix it.
- After 16:00: The company announced: “we believe the incident is now resolved”. This indicates a quick response and fix.
Who was affected?
Despite the short duration of the outage, the impact was significant due to Cloudflare’s key role in the architecture of the modern Internet.
- Global platforms: Access problems were observed in such giants as social network X (formerly Twitter), the developer of the popular chatbot OpenAI (ChatGPT ), and gaming platforms (e.g., League of Legends).
- Ukrainian segment: In Ukraine, a number of news and media resources that use Cloudflare security were affected by the breach.
Similar large-scale failures have occurred before:
October 2023: A short-term but powerful outage that affected Discord, Omegle, and NordVPN services. At the time, the company attributed it to problems with internal configuration management tools.
June 2022: One of the largest outages. Due to a software update error, hundreds of popular services, including FTX, Discord, Shopify, and the Cloudflare website, went down in 19 Cloudflare data centers. The problem was localized in 30 minutes, but it took several hours to restore service.
July 2020: The global blackout was caused by a router configuration error in the company’s backbone network. This led to a 50% drop in traffic worldwide.
What should users do in case of such failures?
Users are advised to:
- Do not refresh pages too often (this creates an additional load).
- Use a VPN (sometimes changing the region helps to bypass the problematic node, although in the case of Cloudflare it is not always effective).
- Just wait – usually such failures are resolved within 30-60 minutes.
