Cloudflare Outage: Bug Causes Widespread Internet Disruption, Affects Top Sites - Explained
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A major outage hit several top online platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, and League of Legends, after Cloudflare, a critical internet infrastructure company, was affected by a 'latent bug'. The issue, which caused widespread disruption to internet services, has been resolved, but not before impacting millions of users. According to Cloudflare's Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht, the bug was triggered by a routine configuration change that caused a cascade of failures in the company's network. 'We failed our customers and the broader internet when a problem in our network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us,' Knecht acknowledged. The outage affected a range of high-profile sites, including Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Moody's credit ratings service. Users attempting to access these sites were met with error messages, including the infamous 'Error Code 500' on Moody's website. Transport services worldwide were also impacted, with the New Jersey Transit system and France's national railway company SNCF experiencing disruptions. The outage even affected the share price of Cloudflare, which manages around 20% of the global internet. Cloudflare's services work by acting as a buffer between users and websites, protecting them from traffic overload and providing faster response times. However, when the system fails, the consequences can be severe, as seen in this outage. The incident has sparked concerns about the resilience of internet infrastructure and the potential for widespread disruption. Cloudflare has promised a full investigation into the cause of the outage and has vowed to provide a complete walkthrough of what went wrong.
