TLDR
- Cloudflare experienced a second outage in three weeks on Friday morning, briefly disrupting access to Coinbase, DoorDash, Zoom, and other major platforms
- The outage was caused by a web application firewall change that made Cloudflare’s network unavailable for several minutes
- Cloudflare stock initially dropped 6% in premarket trading but recovered to close down just 0.7% for the day
- The company manages traffic for roughly 20% of the global web, making any disruption widely felt across multiple platforms
- This follows a similar three-hour outage on November 18 that affected ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), and Spotify
Cloudflare experienced its second major service disruption in less than three weeks on Friday morning. The outage briefly knocked popular platforms offline including Coinbase, DoorDash, Zoom, and LinkedIn.
The company confirmed the issue stemmed from a change to its web application firewall. This modification caused Cloudflare’s network to become unavailable for several minutes starting around 4 a.m. Eastern time.
Cloudflare stock initially tumbled 6% in premarket trading as news of the outage spread. However, the stock recovered throughout the day once service was restored. By market close, NET finished down just 0.7%.
The quick recovery suggests investors weren’t too rattled by the incident. Cloudflare stock has actually gained more than 3% since the previous outage on November 18.
Coinbase confirmed via social media that its platform was affected by the disruption. The cryptocurrency exchange saw users unable to access services during the brief window. Coinbase stock traded slightly lower in premarket hours.
Wide-Reaching Impact Across Platforms
Users of DoorDash, Canva, and Zoom also reported problems during the same timeframe. Downdetector, which tracks service disruptions, showed spikes in reports for multiple platforms simultaneously.
Cloudflare manages and protects traffic for approximately 20% of the global web. When its services go down, the ripple effects touch millions of users worldwide.
The November 18 outage lasted three hours and affected an even broader range of services. That incident disrupted ChatGPT, X, Spotify, League of Legends, and even the New Jersey Transit system.
Richard Ford, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm Integrity360, explained the likely cause. Based on Cloudflare’s statements, the issue came from a database change during planned maintenance. The change overloaded Cloudflare’s systems, he said.
Pattern of Cloud Service Disruptions
Cloudflare isn’t alone in experiencing recent outages. Amazon Web Services suffered a major disruption in late October that affected Reddit and Roblox. Amazon stock actually rose following that incident.
Microsoft dealt with an Azure cloud portal outage last month. That problem left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft, and other services. Microsoft attributed it to a configuration change in its Azure infrastructure.
The frequency of these disruptions appears to be increasing. Ford noted that organizations are putting “more eggs in fewer baskets” as cloud infrastructure consolidates.
The complexity and scale of operations at AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare continues to grow. This creates more potential points of failure.
Cloudflare confirmed the Friday outage was not caused by an attack. The company said it was investigating issues with its dashboard and related APIs after resolving the main service disruption.
Cybersecurity experts say pinpointing the exact cause of such outages typically takes time. Initial assessments often change as more information becomes available.
Edinburgh airport briefly shut down Friday morning but later clarified its outage was a localized issue unrelated to Cloudflare. The company’s web application firewall change affected systems for only several minutes before engineers resolved the problem.
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