Online infrastructure provider Cloudflare has claimed that issues with its services that have taken out a large chunk of the internet, including Prolific North, for much of today (November 18) have now been resolved.
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved,” Cloudflare’s latest update at 2.43pm said. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
It did add the caveat that some customers may still be having some issues, however: “Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard,” the company posted about 20 minutes later. “We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.”
Parts of the web appear to have simply stopped working during the technical problems at Cloudflare.
READ MORE: Spotify down in latest high-profile app outage
Visitors to websites such as X, formerly known as Twitter, ChatGPT, film reviewing site Letterboxd, gaming site Bet365, and your favourite news website for the North’s media and digital industries (that’s us) saw an error message that indicated that Cloudflare problems meant that the page could not show: “Internal server error on Cloudflare’s network,” said the message. “Please try again in a few minutes.”
Among the first sites to be noted as affected by the outage was music streaming service Spotify. Complaints began to surface first thing this morning on social media as UK users getting up for work discovered that their daily dose of tuneage was not available. Down Detector has now indicated that this outage may also be related to the Cloudflare troubles, as well as new problems at AWS, which was subject to a major outage that took out a chunk of the internet itself last month, League of Legends, Sage and many, many more.
Even internet outage tracking website Down Detector was hit by the technical problems, and showed a huge spike in problems at Cloudflare when it did successfully load.But when it loaded it showed a dramatic spike in problems.
Cloudflare may not be a household name to the same degree as Amazon or Meta, but as today’s events have shown its infrastructure invisibly holds up much of the internet, until it doesn’t.
Its most “famous” and central offering is a set of technologies that ensure websites can stay online when they are receiving high amounts of traffic – whether that is coming from an unusually high number of visitors, or an attack designed to take the website down.
Cloudflare, and the tech of similar companies, usually sit between the computers and the websites themselves. These internet infrastructure providers can then use their more resilient data centres to provide website data quickly and reliably. That also means, however, that problems can take down websites quickly, and because the tools are used by such an array of different websites, those problems can quickly knock down a variety of seemingly unconnected pages.
