Cloudfare Outage

Two consecutive months, two hyperscalers, two outages and millions of websites down. Recent events regarding data centre outages have highlighted the fragility and potential over-reliance that the internet has placed on a select number of providers.

What is Cloudfare?

Cloudfare provides internet security, performance and reliability services on a global scale. Their software protects websites and apps from cyber-attacks and bots, as well as speeding up content delivery. They essentially provide a secure and high-speed middle layer between users and websites with the aim to protect both.

What Caused the Cloudfare Outage?

According to Cloudflare, the outage that took place on the 18th November occurred after a file designed to handle traffic malfunctioned, as a feature file double in size. The file exceeded internal file-size limits, so when it was broadcast across Cloudfare’s global network it crashed many of the systems that manage customer traffic. Initially, Cloudfare reported a spike in unusual traffic, suggesting a potential cyber-attack. However, this was later confirmed not to be the case.

The company was able to revert back to a previous working version of the file and solve their issue, but not before the damage had been done. This is the most significant disruption Cloudfare has had since 2019.

What was The Result of the Cloudfare Crash?

As a result, thousands, if not millions of users were unable to access countless websites. Some of the most notable names include ChatGPT, Zoom, Spotify and Canva. It has been estimated that up to 20% of the internet is in some way tied to Cloudfare. Downtime means a loss of productivity, frustration for users and damages trust in network providers, not to mention the huge loss of revenue.

Is this Deja Vu?

When hearing the news, it felt like we’d seen this before. That's because this incident closely follows the high-profile AWS outage last month which disrupted countless organisations. Unlike the Cloudfare outage, there has been enough to time to for estimates to come in on how much the AWS outage cost, with some estimates reaching over a billion dollars. AWS is one of the largest cloud providers in the world, so when they went down it caused a huge ripple effect. These two events in such quick succession raise an important question: how resilient is the internet when so much of it is so reliant on a handful of hyperscalers?

What can You do to Best Protect Your Business?

Diversification is key. Implementing a hybrid strategy reduces risk and regular contingency planning should be common practice. Cloudfare and AWS are some of the biggest names in their field, and events such as these are rare; but recent incidents show that they are not immune to failure.

The internet is becoming increasingly central to both life and business, so resilience should be a priority. These outages serve as a reminder that convenience and scale come with trade-offs, as well as the dangers that come with overreliance on a small number of companies. Not just for your business, but also the internet as a whole.