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The widely used internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered a major outage on tuesday morning, temporarily disrupting numerous websites and apps, including ChatGPT, Spotify, and the social media platform X.
The incident lasted several hours,and follows other major outages in recent months involving Microsoft’s Azure platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
London-based tech analyst Carmi Levy spoke with London Morning host Andrew Brown on Thursday to explain what happened, and what concerns the incidents raise about the stability and security of the internet.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Andrew Brown: I’ve got to admit, I had never heard of Cloudflare. That probably says more about me than Cloudflare, but what does something like that do?
Carmi Levy: This is a company that most of us wouldn’t deal with, likewise most of us don’t deal directly with Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. It’s a content delivery network service, and basically, what it does is it ensures that the websites that we visit every day stay up and running.
so if you run a website, you woudl call amazon or Microsoft or Google to host it for you, than you would call Cloudflare to make sure it’s secure, that it’s protected from those big distributed denial of service attacks that generate headlines every once in a while. It performs a pretty critically important role on the internet. It makes sure that when you visit a website, you’re a human, not a bot. Not someone or something that wants to take that website down.
AB: So then, how does it connect to the cloud?
CL: Cloudflare isn’t something we install on our computers, it’s something that exists only on the web.They have a data center, they work with websites like chatgpt, or X, or even IKEA and spotify. Those companies subscribe to Cloudflare, and they do some technological magic in the background.
For example, sometimes when you sign in to ChatGPT, you’ll get a little puzzle to solve.That’s Cloudflare making sure that you’re a human being, and not a bot trying to break into the system. They sit in front of those websites and apps,and they protect them.
AB: So when Cloudflare goes down, all of those things go down with it?
CL: Exactly. And that’s what we saw on Tuesday. It’s a single point of failure. It’s a reminder that the internet, for all its resilience, is still built on a relatively small number of key infrastructure providers. And when one of those providers has a problem, it can have a cascading effect across the web.
AB: Is this a security issue? Is someone attacking these companies?
CL: In this particular case, it wasn’t a malicious attack. Cloudflare said it was an error in their system, a configuration issue. But it highlights the fact that these systems are complex,and they are vulnerable. And they are constantly being targeted by malicious actors.
We’ve seen a huge increase in cyberattacks in recent years, and these infrastructure providers are on the front lines of that battle. They’re constantly having to defend against attacks, and they’re constantly having to update their systems to stay ahead of the curve.
AB: What does this mean for the future? Are we going to see more of these kinds of outages?
CL: It’s almost inevitable. As we become more reliant on the internet, and as more and more of our lives move online, the risk of these kinds of outages will only increase. the internet is a complex system, and complex systems are prone to failure.
The good news is that these companies are learning from these incidents, and they’re investing in more resilient infrastructure. but it’s a constant arms race. The attackers are always getting more refined, and the defenders