Cloudflare, the firm that blocks AI crawlers that scrape content without paying for it, among other services, went down Tuesday morning, causing widespread disruptions on the
internet.
While brief, outage was serious enough to attract worldwide media coverage.
On the positive side, AI crawlers most likely were down,
too.
Also affected were such entities as X, Shopify, Coinbase, Moody’s, New Jersey Transit and Downdetector—the site that reports on
outages.
And, such popular gaming sites as League of Legends and Valorant were affected.
Downdetector has recovered enough to report that the
Cloudflare outage peaked around 8 a.m. ET and that by 11 a.m. ET, it was returning to normal.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now
resolved,” Cloudflare said in a statement. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
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What caused the
catastrophe? Cloudflare denied that it was driven by malicious actors. The problem apparently started with an automatically generated configuration file hit with great traffic, reports
state.
“I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,” says Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, in a post. “The sites, businesses, and
organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.”