Cloudfare Outage: What Happened In The Background That Caused The Outage Taking Down Apps Like Spotify, X, ChatGPT And More?

Yesterday was a tough one for all the basic internet users who save playlists on Spotify, post their thoughts on X, and use ChatGPT as their assistant. For those who are unaware, all the above mentioned

apps (along with a few more to name) were down because of Cloudflare. Now, a lot of users are curious about what Cloudflare is and what happened in the background that caused this kind of massive disruption. Moving forward, in this article, we will talk about Cloudflare, the issue that caused the outage, and the aftermath.

What Is Cloudflare And How Did The Outage Happen?

Cloudflare, in simple terms, is a global cloud service and cybersecurity firm that offers protection from data loss, cyber threats, along with handling datacentres, email security, and website. The platform calls itself the immune system of the internet, and it blocks billions of cyber threats on a daily basis. Now, when a service so impactful goes down, we are definitely going to see issues on the internet, causing an outage of the scale we saw yesterday. Coming to the outage, Cloudflare has dubbed it 'internal service degradation.' The company started investigating after releasing a fix in just three hours. It is being said that the outage has a specific link to London. Cloudflare identified the root cause as a latest bug in an internal service that is supposed to block the automated traffic for the websites. The bug came into action when a routine configuration change was being done. Due to the change, the database incurred a lot more entries than the expected number in a feature file. That particular file doubled in size and got shared across all the machines in the network. The oversized file caused the software system to crash, affecting large parts of Cloudflare's services. So, the crux here is that the issue was not a cyber attack; instead, it was an internal fault.

Can It Happen Again?

Yes, the straight answer may sound disappointing, but that's the reality of the internet, and no one can change it. As of now, a lot of services available online are dependent on a few infrastructure providers. Now, if any of the provider faces an issue, then it will directly impact the clients, which could be your favorite music listening app, video streaming app, or the friendly neighbourhood AI model.Also Read: Cloudflare Outage: Full List Of Apps And Websites Down GloballyPreviously, we got to see a similar outage with Amazon Web Services that also took down a lot of popular applications for hours. And in the past few months, these kinds of instances have occurred at least once a month. To be honest, from a users point of view, there is not solution to the same because what can you do sitting from your couch if the guards of the internet are falling. But, if you went into a full panic mode after yesterday's outage because your favorite apps were unable to breathe, then you need to change a lot of things - starting with dependency on either of the apps.