Widespread Cloudflare outage blamed on mysterious traffic spike

A Cloudflare outage caused large chunks of the Internet to go dark Tuesday morning, temporarily impacting big platforms like X and ChatGPT. “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” Cloudflare’s status page said. “Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard.” The company initially attributed the widespread outages to “an internal service degradation” and provided updates as it sought a fix over the past two hours. A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.” After the company investigated the “spike in unusual traffic,” Cloudflare’s spokesperson provided a more detailed update, telling Ars, “the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.” “To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity,” the spokesperson said. “We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post-incident, but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours”