Global outage hits Cloudflare again, disrupting major websites

A digital tremor rippled across the globe on Friday as users found themselves abruptly cut off from swathes of the internet, after Cloudflare — the silent backbone supporting thousands of websites — slipped into yet another disruptive outage.

What began as a flicker soon cascaded into a wave of inaccessibility: from popular design platform Canva to Downdetector — the very service people turn to for outage updates — the disruption left users disoriented, frustrated, and scrambling for answers. Numerous Indian websites and news portals, too, were ensnared in the chaos.

This marks the second time in less than a month that Cloudflare has stumbled. A similar outage in November had knocked offline giants like Spotify, ChatGPT, Discord, and even former US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, stirring global confusion.

Yet on Friday, as hours passed, Cloudflare remained silent — offering no official explanation for the latest malfunction, leaving a vacuum filled with speculation and exasperation.

Social media platform X erupted almost instantly. Hashtags surged like sparks from a frayed wire, as users lamented interrupted workdays, stalled business operations, and the unnerving déjà vu of another Cloudflare-wide blackout. Ironically, even Downdetector’s collapse left the public blinking into the digital void, unsure how far the outage stretched.

The recurring nature of these disruptions has fueled calls for transparency and rapid corrective action. Many users voiced concerns that critical digital infrastructure cannot afford such periodic paralysis, especially when so much of modern life hangs on uninterrupted connectivity.

Only weeks ago, Cloudflare attributed its major November meltdown to an internal configuration blunder — not a cyberattack. CEO Matthew Prince explained in a post-mortem that an update intended to improve database access backfired disastrously. A faulty query triggered an avalanche of data into a ClickHouse cluster, causing a key “feature file” used by Cloudflare’s Bot Management system to swell beyond capacity — bringing parts of the internet to its knees.

Now, with another outage bruising global digital traffic, users wait for answers once more — hoping that this latest shadow over the web’s infrastructure will lift quickly, and without leaving deeper cracks beneath the surface.

With IANS inputs