On November 18, prominent internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced that its global network was experiencing issues, leading to service disruptions for many websites and applications, including internet platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT, which became inaccessible. According to media reports, Spotify and Amazon also experienced service outages.
Cloudflare’s stock price once fell by over 5% in pre-market trading.
Cloudflare stock price falls
It is worth noting that on the evening of the 18th, the topics “Cloudflare crashed” and “Twitter crashed” trended on Weibo.
According to its official website, Cloudflare is a global cloud platform that provides a wide range of network services to businesses of all sizes worldwide, while enhancing the performance and reliability of their critical internet assets. Cloudflare also offers data delivery services in 330 cities across 125 countries/regions globally.
Cloudflare is a global cloud platform
On September 13, 2019, Cloudflare rang the bell to list on the New York Stock Exchange.
At 19:17 Beijing time (11:17 London time), Cloudflare’s official website status showed that its supported portal provider was currently experiencing some issues, so customers might encounter errors when viewing or replying to support cases.
Cloudflare official website screenshot
Half an hour later, Cloudflare stated that it was currently experiencing an internal service outage, and some services might be intermittently affected.
Approximately 20 minutes later, the company posted an update stating that the outage had begun to subside, but they were still investigating the issue.
As of 21:13, the company reported that the error rate for some of its services had “returned to pre-incident levels” and efforts were continuing to restore other services.
Cloudflare posts update
As of press time, several internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT, were still affected by the outage, with posts on the X platform displaying “unable to load.”
X platform posts show “unable to load”
In fact, this is not the first large-scale outage for Cloudflare; its system has been “hit” multiple times. In July 2019, a bug in Cloudflare’s software caused part of its network to exhaust company-wide computing resources, leading to outages of up to 30 minutes for thousands of websites globally that relied on its services.
At the time, severely affected websites included prominent platforms such as blog platform Medium, gaming chat service Discord, e-commerce platform Shopify, music service SoundCloud, Bitcoin exchange Coinbase, and online storage provider Dropbox.
In June 2022, Cloudflare experienced another outage, affecting 19 data centers that handle most of its global traffic, causing several major websites and services to go offline. This incident lasted approximately one and a half hours.
(Disclaimer: The content and data in this article are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Investors act on this information at their own risk.)
National Business Daily comprehensive report from Shanghai Securities News, Cailian Press, and public information
