Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure companies, went down again on Friday, December 5, affecting several websites globally.
According to The Independent, the power outage affected much of the internet: X (formerly Twitter), Substack, Canva and others appeared to be down.
Notably, among these was Down Detector, a tracking site that shows outages around the world.
However, some sites that had been affected by a major outage last month were not affected now; they probably reduced their reliance on Cloudflare in the meantime. Among them was ChatGPT.
Visitors to several pages saw an “Internal Server Error 500” warning instead of the content they expected.
On November 18, several major websites around the world, including in Romania, experienced serious operational problems following a major failure recorded at Cloudflare.
The DNSC website also went down in November, but the institution managed to inform that it was not a cyber attack that caused the downfall of several websites, they were unavailable due to problems with Cloudflare services.
“During the day today, several websites (including the DNSC website, but also the websites of some media entities or social networks) became unavailable due to service delivery issues with Cloudflare. The reported issues have been fixed in the meantime”DNSC informed.
Cloudflare is a company that provides website security and performance enhancement services by acting as a reverse proxy that directs traffic between visitors and a website’s server.
Because of this intermediary role, the unavailability of the company’s services causes errors when accessing the websites under management, without signaling a problem with the infrastructure of the respective site.
