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Internet Blackout Briefly Hits Popular Websites Due to Cloudflare Glitch
Early Friday, a significant technical issue at the internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare caused a temporary outage for a slew of popular websites worldwide. The problem, which began around 9:00 a.m. London time, was resolved within a few hours, bringing affected sites back online.
Cloudflare, a company crucial to managing and securing approximately 20% of the internet’s traffic, reported issues with its dashboard and associated application programming interfaces (APIs). The disruption impacted major platforms such as LinkedIn, Coinbase, and Substack. Outage monitoring service Downdetector also noted a spike in reported problems for Shopify, HSBC, and the UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo shortly after 9:00 a.m.
The company’s services are vital for safeguarding websites against various cyber threats, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to overwhelm sites with excessive traffic.
Cloudflare announced that a fix had been implemented and that it was actively monitoring the results. According to its official status website, all systems are now fully operational.
This incident follows a similar widespread outage last month, also attributed to a Cloudflare error. That earlier issue affected a range of prominent websites, including the social media platform X, Google, OpenAI, and United Press International.