Several websites are experiencing major errors apparently linked to Cloudflare, with sites such as LinkedIn and Canva seemingly suffering widespread issues.
The outage comes just over two weeks after Cloudflare’s last global outage, which took out a number of popular websites including ChatGPT.
It’s unclear at present whether the issue is a repeat of the technical problem that caused the previous outage, in which a database error in its bot management system led to widespread software failures on its network machines.
ITPro noted websites such as LinkedIn, Canva, and even the outage checker site Downdetector displayed a ‘500 Internal Server Error’ message.
UPDATE: Cloudflare has identified the cause of the issue which it says is now fixed.
"A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare's network at approximately 8:47 GMT and concluded approximately 9:13 GMT," a Cloudflare spokesperson told ITPro.
"This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share full details in a blog post today."
The past month has seen a wave of outages hitting online service providers, including one affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) and another causing widespread disruption to sites hosted via Microsoft Azure.
None of the outages were linked to cyber attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, but instead were all technical issues.
“Today’s disruption underscores something many of us in cybersecurity and tech have long warned about – as the Internet has grown more complex, a handful of infrastructure providers end up holding unexpectedly large power over its functioning,” said Richard Ford, CTO at Integrity360.
“Cloudflare sits at the heart of that, providing CDN, proxying, routing, DNS and caching so that websites can stay fast, secure and resilient under load.”
Ford said businesses should consider more investment in redundancies and hybrid cloud setups and question reliance on a single provider for their critical infrastructure.
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