New Delhi. In the morning, when many people opened big websites like X, Spotify, OpenAI or ChatGPT, the only message they got was “try again in a few minutes”. Outage tracking sites like DownDetector were also not able to load themselves. It seemed as if half of the Internet had sat together. A name was written on the screen of some – Clouudfare.com. But no one understood what it was. When people searched it on Google, they understood that this is a separate company which is linked to all these websites.
Gradually it came to light that this problem is not due to any one app but is due to something on which all these websites depend. Clouudfare.com is the reason which put internet users all over the world under pressure. Thousands of websites and apps around the world, including the biggest names, use Cloudflare’s services. When there was a glitch in Cloudflare, its impact was directly visible on all those websites.
what does cloudflare do
You can consider Cloudflare as the road on the Internet through which millions and crores of people pass every second. Just like when a major flyover in the city is closed, the entire traffic gets jammed, similarly when Cloudflare is down, the internet gets jammed. If understood in simple language, Cloudflare does two things.
- First, it helps websites open faster by redirecting traffic.
- Second, it protects websites from cyber attacks so that hackers cannot shut them down.
If you visit any big website, it first passes through Cloudflare’s traffic system. It is just like you go through security check before entering a mall. If the same security check suddenly fails then a long queue forms and no one is able to enter inside. This is what happened on the internet today.
The specialty of Cloudflare is that its data centers are located all over the world, which distribute internet traffic. But today there was such a huge spike of “unusual traffic” on a service that its system faltered and the disturbance spread. You can understand it as if thousands of vehicles suddenly reach one toll plaza and the barrier gets jammed. Due to this the traffic comes to a standstill. Because of this, errors started appearing everywhere from X and Spotify to OpenAI.
company statement
Cloudflare said its network experienced a sudden unusual surge in traffic around 11:20 am. Due to this some services started giving errors. The company says that this is not a cyber attack. Investigation is going on and gradually many services have started returning to normal. However, the company has not yet told when the entire system will be fixed.
Cloudflare said that “customers may still see more errors as we work on a fix.” The company also said that their entire focus is currently on restoring service and after that the reason for the traffic spike will be investigated.
CTO’s apology
Cloudflare CTO Danny Knecht clearly said on social media, “We let our customers down.” He said that such a large share of the Internet is dependent on Cloudflare and millions of people were affected by this glitch.
He said that this was not due to any attack but due to a “latent bug” that the bot mitigation service handles. This bug became active after a routine configuration change and gradually the problems spread throughout the network. He said that the company will soon release the complete technical breakdown in detail so that people can understand what exactly happened.
