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Cloudflare experienced another widespread outage on Friday, taking major websites and online services offline for the second time in less than a month and revealing the internet’s reliance on a handful of core infrastructure providers.
Platforms including Zoom, Discord, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Shopify, Substack, Canva, Coinbase and Vinted were among those reporting disruptions. Several services essential to daily communication, ecommerce and financial transactions were inaccessible for periods of the morning, prompting a wave of user complaints across social media.
Reports to outage-tracking site DownDetector surged past 4,500 in the UK shortly after 9am GMT, though the site itself was briefly affected before returning. Users described business operations being halted for the second time in weeks, while others noted the potential financial impact on companies dependent on Cloudflare’s network.
Cloudflare said it began investigating the issue just after 9am and later reported that a fix had been implemented. Dane Knecht, the company’s chief technology officer, confirmed an “issue impacting the availability of Cloudflare’s network,” but denied the outage was caused by a cyberattack. He said the incident stemmed from internal logging changes related to mitigating a recently disclosed software vulnerability.
The disruption arrives only two weeks after a significant Cloudflare failure that also took major sites offline. The back-to-back incidents have renewed attention on the fragility of the internet’s underlying infrastructure and the far-reaching consequences when a single major provider experiences technical problems.
Experts noted that Cloudflare supports a vast share of global web traffic through services including content delivery, DNS, routing and security protection. When one component of that network falters, the effects can cascade across unrelated organisations and services.
Friday’s outage occurred shortly after Cloudflare had warned of scheduled maintenance at a Detroit data centre, though the company has not yet confirmed whether the events were connected. A detailed incident report is expected later today.
As operations gradually returned to normal, users voiced frustration at the frequency and scale of recent failures, an increasingly familiar reminder of how dependent daily life and business have become on a small number of technology providers.
