Cloudflare Bug Knocks Out 20% of Internet, Including Major Crypto Services

_{Photo credit: DC Studio / Shutterstock.com}

The American internet infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare says a bug in its bot management system was responsible for a major outage that knocked out approximately 20% of webpages. 

One third of the world’s 10,000 most popular websites, apps, and services were affected, with major crypto services such as Coinbase and BitMex among those impacted.  

The company revealed that a “feature file” within its bot management system used to combat cyberattacks grew beyond its expected size, causing failures in its software. Despite initial fears that the incident was the result of a significant distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, there was no malicious attack or external actor involved. 

With so many popular services relying on Cloudflare, platforms such as ChatGPT, X, Canva, and PayPal were also down. The scale of the disruption has drawn attention to the vulnerability of centralized infrastructure and the risks of potentially disastrous disruption.

Cloudflare has apologized, stating:

Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable… Now that our systems are back online and functioning normally, work has already begun on how we will harden them against failures like this in the future.