Several major online platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, and ‘League of Legends,’ suffered a significant global outage on Tuesday. The disruption was traced back to Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that provides critical services to these platforms, which later confirmed the issue was caused by a “latent bug.”
The Cause: Latent Bug and Cascading Failure
Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, acknowledged the severity of the incident, admitting that the company “failed” its customers and the “broader Internet.”
Knecht provided a detailed explanation of the technical failure, clarifying that the outage was “not an attack”:
“In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services.”
The issue, therefore, was an internal systems failure triggered by a routine update that exposed an existing, hidden flaw.
Platforms and Services Affected
Due to Cloudflare’s massive reach, handling approximately 20 per cent of the global internet’s traffic, the outage impacted services far beyond typical tech platforms:
- Major Tech Platforms: X, ChatGPT, Canva, Spotify, Dropbox, and Coinbase.
- Financial and Corporate Services: Moody’s credit ratings service, which displayed an ‘Error Code 500’ directing users to the Cloudflare website.
- Global Transport Services: The New Jersey Transit system reported slow-loading or temporarily unavailable online services. France’s national railway company (SNCF) also warned customers that some schedules might be unavailable due to the Cloudflare issue.
Restoration and Repercussions
Cloudflare managed to resolve the impact on general network traffic at approximately 14:30 UTC (8:00 PM IST on Tuesday). However, Knecht noted that the incident required “some additional work” to fully restore the control plane (the dashboard and APIs customers use to configure their Cloudflare services), which is now reportedly “fully available.” The company has pledged to provide a complete public walkthrough of the cause and resolution.
The financial repercussions were immediate, with Cloudflare’s share price dipping by 1.5% in early trading following the news.
How the Failure Impacts the Internet
Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert and professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, explained the fundamental role of Cloudflare:
“When you access a website protected by Cloudflare, your computer doesn’t connect directly to that site. Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare server… That protects the website from a flood of traffic, and it provides you with a faster response. It’s a win-win for everyone, until it fails, and 20% of the internet goes down at the same time.”