Update: Internet chaos as Cloudflare outage takes down major platforms - internal error confirmed
The disruption, which began in the early hours of the day, highlighted the fragile interconnectedness of the modern web, with even Downdetector, a service that tracks online outages, itself succumbing to the problems.
Cloudflare, a company that provides critical security and content delivery services for a vast portion of the internet, first acknowledged the issue on its official status dashboard.
"Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly," it said.
After an initial period of complete disruption, Cloudflare began a phased recovery process. In a significant update, the company announced progress in restoring two of its key services: Cloudflare Access and Warp, a VPN service used by millions.
"Update - We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and Warp to recover. Error levels for Access and Warp users have returned to pre-incident rates," the company stated. In a further sign of stabilisation, "We have re-enabled Warp access in London."
Despite this progress, the company cautioned that the incident is not fully resolved, adding, "We are continuing to work towards restoring other services." This indicates that while a critical corner has been turned, full restoration of all Cloudflare-powered platforms is still underway.
Update: Cloudflare explains cause of outage
Cloudflare has since confirmed that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, but rather an internal configuration error. In a detailed update, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said a change to one of its database systems accidentally generated a faulty configuration file used by its Bot Management system.
The file doubled in size and exceeded system limits, causing proxy failures across its global network and triggering widespread HTTP 5xx errors. The company initially suspected a major DDoS attack before identifying the root cause and rolling back the change.
Core traffic began recovering from 4.30pm South African time, with full restoration completed at around 7.06pm South African time. Cloudflare apologised for the disruption, calling it its most significant outage since 2019 and stressing that steps are being taken to prevent a repeat.