Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare has fully restored its services after an outage took websites like X and ChatGPT offline.
The outage began at 11:20 am GMT (10:20 pm AEDT), with core internet traffic restored after around three hours and all systems fully repaired by 5:06 pm GMT. It was caused by a mistaken change to its database systems that doubled the size of certain files, Cloudflare said, which left its software unable to direct internet traffic.
“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,” Cloudflare wrote.
“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare's importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable.”
More than 13,000 Cloudflare outage reports were submitted to internet outage tracker Downdetector by Australian users from 10:30 pm to 3:00 am AEDT.
Platforms like Zoom, Canva, Shopify, Dropbox, and Coinbase also went down due to the Cloudflare outage.
Cloudflare routes websites’ online traffic through its network to reduce loading times and protect against attacks, and is used by an estimated 20.4% of all websites. Its most recent major outage was in June, lasting two hours and 28 minutes.
A similar outage at cloud provider Amazon Web Services in October impacted platforms including Slack, Lloyds Bank, Duolingo, and Playstation Network, as well as many of Amazon’s services.
Cloudflare’s (NYSE: NET) share price closed at US$196.53, down from its previous close at $202.25. Its market capitalisation is $68.84 billion.
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