What went wrong with Cloudflare? Is it fixed now? Here’s all you need to know

Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company, has blamed an ‘internal service degradation’ for the widespread outage it has been facing on Tuesday, 18 November.

The service disruption affected a number of top websites like X, Spotify, PayPal, Canva, Perplexity, and others.

What went wrong?

“Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly,” Cloudflare said on its system status site.

The problem has been identified as a “global network outage” by the company which is causing widespread API as well as dashboard failures.

“A latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made,” said the company’s Chief Technical officer, Dane Knecht.

“That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” he added.

Downdetector also showed a massive spike in complaints over various websites not working. Moreover, Downdetector itself was struggling to load due to the same Cloudflare issue.

Is it fixed now?

In reply to an X user, Knecht has said that the issue has been fixed.

“It is resolved,” he said, when the user asked him “How long will it take to fix?”

Knecht, in hisa statement on X, wherein he said, “I won’t mince words: 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. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused.”

“Transparency about what happened matters,” Knecht said, adding that the company will be sharing a breakdown of the issue in a few hours.

“Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back,” he also said.