Websites go down worldwide due to Cloudflare outage

Internet network and security provider Cloudflare experienced a massive outage Tuesday morning, with websites around the world unable to load and the cause of the outage not immediately clear.

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that he was “aware of major @Cloudflare issues impacting us network wide. Team is working on getting to the bottom of what’s going on. Will continue to update.”

{mosads}Less than a half hour after that tweet, Prince tweeted that “traffic restored. Working now to restore all services globally.”

The outage did not appear to last long, with Cloudflare posting online that it had “implemented a fix for this issue” and that it was “monitoring the results” 23 minutes after it wrote that “we are working to mitigate impact to Internet users.”

The amount of websites impacts was likely in the millions. According to Cloudflare, it hosts over 16 million internet properties, and the company powers internet requests for around 10 percent of the Fortune 1,000 companies and for more than one billion IP addresses every day.

Websites including those for the Drudge Report, The Diplomat, and chat service Discord were not able to load, with users receiving a “502” error message. Several cryptocurrency trading groups such as Circle Invest, and Poloniex Exchange were also briefly down.

While there was some speculation online that the outage was caused by a cyber attack, Prince told The Hill that Cloudflare had found “no evidence” that this was the case, and that the outage was actually caused by a “massive spike in the CPU usage,” or the network processor usage.

“That is a failure scenario that we hadn’t ever seen before, it took us a while to figure out what the cause was, there was a runaway process that looked like it was causing the issue,” Prince said. “We were able to shut down that process and restore all of Cloudflare services within about 30 minutes.”

In terms of why there were more websites reported down in the United States and Europe, Prince said this was “more of a symptom of who was awake” while Cloudflare was down.

Updated at 11:15 a.m.