Cloudfare, a company that helps websites secure and manage Internet traffic, faced issues with its global network on Tuesday, causing many sites—such as Spotify, OpenAI, X and even Inklings—to go down. These issues have since been resolved, and the websites are now functioning normally.
Originally, Cloudfare believed that a DDoS attack—which is, according to Cloudfare, a type of cyber attack where a hacker floods an Internet system with too much activity—caused the issues. It has since been discovered that, actually, a file triggered a crash in the software system that manages traffic for much of Cloudflare’s services.
“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,” Cloudflare said in a statement.
At Staples, students noticed that certain websites, such as AP Classroom, were down in the morning. This caused a brief interruption in their ability to complete schoolwork online.
“[For websites to be down like this] is not common at all, but it does happen,” computer science teacher Dr. Nick Morgan said. “If it goes down again, [all you can do is] wait until it comes back up. Or, you can use a different website that didn’t go down.”
Once Cloudflare identified the core issue, they were able to resolve the malfunction within a few hours. According to the New York Times, they received their first complaints before 7 a.m.; the problems were mostly solved by 9:30, and Cloudflare said everything was “operating normally” at 12:45 p.m.
“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,” Cloudflare said. “Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.”
