Cloudflare has experienced another outage after disruption last month impacted various websites around the world, including social media platform X and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
On Friday morning, websites including graphic design platform Canva and e-commerce company Shopify, which powers millions of businesses, faced issues during the outage.
Shopify flagged the problem on its website at 9.16am, announcing just 14 minutes later that the issue had been resolved and was being monitored.
Cloudflare said that it was investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.
The issues came after the internet services company announced plans for scheduled maintenance at a Detroit datacentre between 9am and 1pm and at a site in Chicago between 7am and 11am on Friday, which it said could result in a “slight increase in latency” for end-users in these regions.
The company did not say whether the outage was linked to this maintenance.
However, while the business also did not confirm a link between maintenance work and November’s outage, the issues it experienced last month followed announcements of scheduled maintenance at data centres in Santiago, Tahiti, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.
“The recent AWS and Cloudflare outages have highlighted how heavily the Internet depends on a small number of major content delivery networks (CDNs),” said Ryan Polk, director of policy, the Internet Society.
He added: “CDNs offer clear advantages: they improve reliability, reduce latency, and lower transit demand. However, when too much Internet traffic is concentrated within a few providers, these networks can become single points of failure that disrupt access to large parts of the Internet.”
Richard Ford, chief technology officer at cyber firm Integrity360, agreed that as the internet has grown more complex, a handful of infrastructure providers end up “holding unexpectedly large power over its functioning.”
“Cloudflare sits at the heart of that, providing CDN, proxying, routing, DNS and caching so that websites can stay fast, secure and resilient under load,” continued Ford. “When a provider like this fails, whether due to internal error, configuration change or external attack, the ripple effects hit far more than just a few sites.
“What feels like one outage to a user is actually a systemic failure affecting traffic flows across many unrelated organisations.”
