Internet Outage Causes Blank Pages on Many Websites Says Cloudflare

Numerous websites experienced significant outages recently due to issues with the internet service provider, Cloudflare. This incident affected major platforms like LinkedIn, Zoom, and Canva, leading to numerous reports of blank pages on user screens.

Cloudflare Investigates Outage and Reports

The disturbance began around 9 AM when Cloudflare announced it was investigating issues relating to its Dashboard and related APIs, stating it had received reports of “a large number of empty pages.” Shortly after this announcement, the company claimed it was implementing fixes and actively monitoring the situation. However, many websites remained inaccessible for most of the morning.

Impact of the Outage

• DownDetector, a platform for monitoring online service disruptions, also experienced downtime due to this incident.
• Upon its return, DownDetector recorded over 4,500 reports concerning Cloudflare-related issues.
• Cloudflare services are utilized by approximately 20% of all websites, highlighting the extensive impact of the outage.

This incident mirrors previous outages experienced by Cloudflare. In November, over 10,000 users reported similar disruptions affecting platforms like Twitter, Spotify, ChatGPT, and Facebook, among others. During that time, Cloudflare announced it was facing “internal service degradation,” causing intermittent service issues.

Recurring Outage Patterns

Last October, a significant outage knocked thousands of websites offline due to problems stemming from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Additionally, a software update error from CrowdStrike last year led to over eight million computers crashing globally, which severely disrupted news services and healthcare operations.

Expert Insights on Internet Infrastructure

Following the recent outage, Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, remarked on the implications of such an event. He stated, “If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable.” He emphasized that the underlying issue lies in the outdated network infrastructure, which presents a single point of failure in the internet’s legacy design.

This situation emphasizes the critical nature of robust internet service providers like Cloudflare and raises important considerations about the resilience and reliability of current internet infrastructure.