DDoS protection giant Cloudflare just went out, paralyzing major corners of the internet. Yet, blockchain networks like Bitcoin remain resilient.
Cloudflare provides a range of internet and cybersecurity-related services, being most known for its “Checking your browser…” DDoS protection page that has become a familiar sight when navigating to some popular websites.
About 20% of the global traffic passes through the company, so any issues related to it can have widespread impacts. The outage today clearly showcased it, as it caused issues for thousands of users around the world.
I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.
Some of the biggest names impacted by the issue included ChatGPT, X, Uber, and McDonald’s. Ironically, even Downdetector, a website that helps users track outages around the internet, itself went down during the event.
It took Cloudflare a few hours to get the issue sorted. At 14:42 UTC, the status page reported, “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved.” There were some hiccups post this patch, but they were resolved by 17:44 UTC, as the website updated with, “We are no longer observing elevated errors or latency across the network.”
The market initially reacted to the event, as Cloudflare’s stock dropped to $194, but once the company restored services, its price jumped back to $199.
Unlike the usual networks that usually have some point of centralization, blockchain networks run in a completely decentralized manner. This means that even if some nodes go offline, the network isn’t affected.
As for what caused the latest Cloudflare outage, Knecht has said it was a latent bug in a service related to the company’s bot mitigation capability. It started to crash, cascading into a broad degradation of Cloudflare services. “This was not an attack,” clarified Knecht.
The CTO has also shared that an investigation report is on the way, with transparent details related to what happened during the event included.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $93,300, down 9.5% over the last week.
