A widespread infrastructure outage has taken down a range of websites and services, including most major Australian airports, Uber and ChatGPT, causing massive disruptions across the internet.
The outage, which struck Cloudflare’s global network, not only brought down major services but also affected any website that uses the service for its content delivery—including Tech Business News.
The I.T. problem also prevented Airservices Australia – the government organisation that controls air traffic – from processing flight plans automatically, resulting in cancled flights.
The airport was forced to switch to completing flight plans manually, which significantly slowed down the the flight planning process and caused major delays across all Australian airlines.
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, works behind the scenes to make the internet faster and safer, but when problems flare up “it results in massive digital gridlock,” according to industry observers.
The issue, which also coincided with outages for Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service, was identified quickly but problems lasted for hours.
Content delivery network and security services provider Cloudflare first said its global network was “experiencing issues” just before 11.50am GMT (10.50pm AEDT) on Tuesday.
The $US70 billion ($107.7 billion) company boasts that about 20% of the internet runs through its network and it has millions of customers, including 35% of the Fortune 500.
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,” it said. “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”
APIs are used to connect between different platforms, sites or services, 500 errors are generic errors usually linked to web servers and companies use the dashboard to manage their Cloudflare services.
The company rolled out a fix about 1.45am on Wednesday but said “intermittent errors” remained a few hours later, although they were reducing.
Affected sites included X, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide airports, and Downdetector, which uses Cloudflare to verify users aren’t bots before letting them access the site.
When Downdetector returned to functionality it also showed spikes in outage complaints from users of Amazon Web Services, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, film site Letterboxd, dating app Grindr, popular online game League of Legends and design app Canva.
The outage highlights the internet’s reliance on a handful of major infrastructure providers, where a single point of failure can cascade across thousands of services and affect millions of users worldwide.
Impacted CloudFlare Services
- Access
- Bot Management
- CDN/Cache
- Dashboard
- Firewall
- Network
- WARP
- Workers
After several hours of investigation and recovery efforts, the company announced that the issue had been fully resolved by 19:28 UTC
