How dependent the web is on a few providers

• Cloudflare outage shows how much the internet relies on a few providers.
• Recent AWS and Azure failures underscore the need for better backup plans.

Cloudflare faced a major outage this week that took down large parts of the internet for several hours. Websites like ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and the outage-tracking site Downdetector showed error messages instead of loading normally.

Problems began shortly after 11:30 GMT, when thousands of users started reporting issues in a wide list of apps and sites. Downdetector, which collects those reports, was also affected.

Cloudflare said the outage started when a configuration file meant to manage threat traffic failed and “triggered a crash” in the software that handles requests in its services.

“We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today,” the company said. It also noted that “given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable.”

The issue was fixed, but the company warned that some services could still show errors as they came back online.

The impact was broad. Users saw delays or had trouble opening apps like Grindr, Zoom, and Canva. ChatGPT’s website told users to “please unblock challenges cloudflare.com to proceed.”

Cloudflare provides internet security and traffic management for a huge share of the web. It checks whether visitors to sites are real people or bots, and offers other services that keep sites online during heavy traffic. The company says about 20% of all websites make use of its tools in some way.

Cloudflare stressed that the problem was technical. “To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity,” its statement said.

The outage comes only a month after Amazon Web Services went down, taking more than a thousand sites and apps offline. Similar issues also hit Microsoft Azure and AWS in the same week, disrupting major parts of the internet that rely on these large providers.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of monitoring firm Catchpoint, said the recent run of failures should serve as a “wake-up call” for companies. “Everybody’s putting all their eggs in one basket, and then they’re surprised when there is a problem,” he said. “It’s on the company’s side to make sure that they have redundancy and resiliency.”

Cloudflare supports a wide section of the web through its content delivery network, DDoS protection, and DNS services. Last year, the company said its network carries about one-fifth of internet traffic and serves 35% of Fortune 500 companies, along with many others.

The outage also brought renewed attention to how dependent the internet has become on a small group of infrastructure providers. After the recent AWS outage disrupted the secure messaging app Signal, its president, Meredith Whittaker, said the company had little choice but to use a major provider.

Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET, said the last few months have shown how fragile these systems can be. “Companies are often forced to heavily rely on the likes of Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Amazon for hosting their websites and services as there aren’t many other options,” he said. He added that DNS systems, which translate website names into numbers computers understand, are “based on an outdated, legacy network” that can fail in ways that cause large-scale outages. While the system is hard to replace, he noted that major cloud providers tend to have stronger protections than smaller ones.

Cloudflare said it has now restored its services following the outage. According to the company, an automatically generated configuration file meant to manage security threats grew too large and crashed the software that routes traffic for several of its services. The company said it has deployed a fix but warned that some customers may still see issues as systems recover worldwide. Its stock dipped 2.3% in morning trading.

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