Several major websites and online services, including
social network X and AI chatbot ChatGPT, experienced disruptions on Tuesday
after US-based online services provider Cloudflare reported being affected by a
“latent bug.”
Web monitoring platform Downdetector recorded outages
affecting users of X, the video game League of Legends, and certain
services from Google and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Cloudflare, which
manages approximately 20 percent of global internet traffic, also saw its share
price drop 1.5 percent in early trading.
“Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader
internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic
that rely on us,” Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht wrote on X.
He explained that the issue arose from “a latent bug in a service underpinning
our bot mitigation capability” that crashed following a routine configuration
change.
The company noted that there had been “a spike in
unusual traffic” affecting one of its services. The outage is reminiscent of
last month’s disruptions at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft cloud
services, which impacted video games, businesses, and transport firms.
Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the
University of Surrey, said the incident highlights the internet’s reliance on a
few major service providers. “It’s a double-edged sword as these service
providers need to be large to provide the scale and global reach required by
big brands. But when they fail, the impact can be significant,” he explained.
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