MADRID — Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it had restored services after an outage that occurred this morning took down several global websites, including LinkedIn, Zoom and others. second such accident impact the company in less than three weeks.
Cloudflare said the issue has been resolved and is not related to the attack. A change in the way the firewall processes requests “caused Cloudflare's network to become unavailable for several minutes this morning,” the company said.
The company said it is “investigating issues with the Cloudflare Dashboard and its associated APIs,” or application programming interface that allows software systems to communicate with each other.
Cybersecurity experts say it usually takes time to determine the exact cause of an outage.
But based on Cloudflare's initial statements, Friday's incident “came down to a database change they made as part of routine maintenance that went a little wrong,” according to Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, a European and African cybersecurity firm.
It “essentially overloaded their systems,” he said.
Edinburgh Airport had to be closed briefly on Friday morning. But later at the airport they reported that the outage was a local problem it was not associated with Cloudflare.
In November, a three-hour Cloudflare outage affected users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game League of Legends to the New Jersey transit system.
Last month Microsoft had to implement a fix to resolve a glitch in its Azure cloud portal that was preventing users from accessing Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The technology company wrote on its Azure status page that a change to the Azure infrastructure configuration caused the failure.
Amazon also faced a massive power outage cloud computing service in October.
“This is one of those things that we're going to see more and more,” said cybersecurity expert Ford. “We are seeing an increase in frequency as organizations put more eggs in fewer baskets, and as operations such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare become more complex, size and scale (grow).
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This version has been updated to reflect the fact that Edinburgh Airport says its temporary closure is not related to the Cloudflare outage.
