Websites Back Online as Cloudflare Says Problem Fixed

While the issue has been fixed, some people may still be experiencing problems logging in to or using Cloudflare services.

A lobby window at the headquarters of Cloudflare in San Francisco, Calif., on Aug. 31, 2022. Eric Risberg/AP Photo

Cloudflare said the problem that caused numerous websites to go down on Nov. 18 has been fixed.

“A fix has been implemented, and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” Cloudflare said in an update at 9:42 a.m. EST.

The issue cropped up about three hours earlier, affecting platforms including YouTube, X, and Google, leaving some users unable to access them. Other affected sites included Truth Social, Shopify, Indeed, and Zoom.

Cloudflare provides Internet infrastructure for sites, including routing user requests through servers located around the globe. Cloudflare said it is responsible for handling traffic for about 20 percent of the Internet, or trillions of requests per day.

A Cloudflare spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email after the sites became inaccessible that there had been an unusual spike in traffic, causing errors for users, and that the company was working to restore service before turning its attention to the cause of the spike.

After the problem was fixed, the company identified the cause of the outage as “a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” the spokesperson said.

“The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.

“To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post-incident, but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours.

“A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve.”

While the issue has been fixed, some people may still be experiencing problems logging in to or using Cloudflare services, the company said after announcing the fix had been implemented.

“The team is continuing to focus on restoring service post-fix. We are mitigating several issues that remain post-deployment,” it said.

The outage occurred several weeks after Amazon Web Services, a Cloudflare competitor, and Microsoft’s Azure platform both stopped working for several hours.

Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.