Several websites, including Linkedin, Zoom and Canva, went down after new issues with internet provider Cloudflare.
The web infrastructure company said at around 9am that it was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs (application programming interfaces)” after reports of “a large number of empty pages”.
Shortly after the announcement, Cloudflare said it had implemented a fix and was monitoring to see if it had worked, but several websites remained blank throughout the morning.
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DownDetector, a site used to monitor online service issues, also went down as a result of the issue. When it came back online, it recorded more than 4,500 reports related to issues at Cloudflare.
Cloudflare, which provides network and security services for many online businesses, claims that around a fifth of all websites use some form of its services.
Issues also affected the company in November, when more than 10,000 people reported issues with outages for X, Spotify, ChatGPT, Facebook, AWS (Amazon Web Services), bet365, Canva, BrightHR and the multi-player game League of Legends – all of which use Cloudflare services.
The company said in a server update at the time that it was “experiencing an internal service degradation” and that some services may be intermittently affected.
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That came after a major outage affected thousands of websites in October, as a result of issues originating from AWS.
And last year, more than eight million computers crashed worldwide – knocking Sky News off the air and causing significant backlogs for GPs – after a software update from cyber security company CrowdStrike went wrong.
In response to Friday’s outage, Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at internet security company ESET, said: “If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable.
“The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites, but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.”
