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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Online security company Cloudflare experienced a widespread global outage on Tuesday, impacting popular sites such as X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, causing them to go offline for some users. The San Francisco-based company quickly identified the issue and began implementing a fix, attributing the problem to “internal service degradation.”
Cloudflare reassured users that services were being restored, but cautioned that customers may encounter higher than normal error rates. The company also acknowledged that its network was offline and reported difficulties with its customer support site. Collaborating with its third-party provider, Cloudflare worked diligently to understand the full extent of the impact and mitigate the problem.
As a key player in the internet infrastructure, Cloudflare’s technology supports over 20% of all websites, providing essential services like protection against cyber security threats. The outage also affected other prominent entities such as retailer Ikea, image-editing app Canva, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and domestic intelligence agency MI5, as reported by Downdetector.
This incident closely follows a recent outage experienced by Amazon’s cloud business, which affected various organizations including ride-hailing app Lyft, coffee chain Starbucks, Lloyds Bank, and ChatGPT. Cloudflare attributed the recent outage to a sudden increase in abnormal traffic to one of its services, causing errors in traffic flow through its network.
Despite the challenges, Cloudflare’s dedicated team is actively working to ensure smooth traffic flow and investigate the root cause of the unusual spike in traffic. The company, which went public in 2019 and boasts a market value of $71 billion, saw its shares dip by 5% in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
As the internet continues to evolve and expand, incidents like these serve as a reminder of the critical role that companies like Cloudflare play in maintaining the stability and security of online services. Stay tuned for further updates on this developing situation.
