A technical issue that hit internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare appears to be mostly resolved after sending a ripple effect across parts of the internet Tuesday morning with multiple global outages reported.
Global News received a response from Cloudflare confirming how the outage occurred.
“The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services,” said Cloudflare in an emailed response to Global News.
“There is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today (Tuesday). We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”
According to Cloudflare’s status log on its website, the company began experiencing technical issues around the same time it was scheduled to do maintenance overnight on Nov. 18.
“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly,” said Cloudflare on its website earlier Tuesday.
Outages lasting several hours appeared to hit websites including X, DownDetector, Dayforce, Canva, Indeed, Claude AI and IKEA among others, according to updates on status pages and media reporting.