Large sections of the internet stopped working on Tuesday morning. Among the sites affected by the latest in a weeks-long series of outages were Amazon Web Services, X, League of Legends, the betting site bet365, Spotify, ChatGPT, and — ironically — the website that monitors online outages, Downdetector.
The problem appears to be the result of issues at Cloudflare, a San Francisco-headquartered tech company that effectively serves as a backbone to a myriad of sites, providing content delivery network and wide area network services, domain registration, and cybersecurity.
‘We saw a spike in unusual traffic.’
At the time of writing, the Cloudflare system status page indicated that the company was working toward restoring global network services, having hours earlier acknowledged “experiencing an internal service degradation” that could leave some services “intermittently impacted.”
The latest outages come just days after Cloudflare admitted an “issue which potentially impacts multiple customers” — an issue that was supposedly “resolved.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare said in a statement obtained by the Guardian, “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am [London time]. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services.”
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” continued the spokesperson. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”
The company’s engineers were reportedly scheduled to conduct some maintenance work on data centers in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Tahiti, and Santiago, Chile. It’s unclear whether their efforts had anything to do with the technical issues.
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