Things are not their best with Cloudflare lately. Over the past weeks, there was a massive outage with Cloudflare, causing the inability for several users across the globe to access websites.
Then, there was another outage on Friday that affected platforms like DoorDash, and even gaming platforms like “Fortnite,” “League of Legends,” and “Escape from Tarkov.”
Downdetector recorded a significant spike in users reporting outages with Cloudflare, but that happened 3:37 a.m. on Friday, so not a very significant one, declining eventually by 5:07 a.m. The sites went operational around 5:30 a.m.
‘Not an attack’
Cloudflare clarified that these were not an attack.
"A change made to how Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall parses requests impacted the availability of Cloudflare’s network at approximately 8:47 GMT and concluded approximately 9:13 GMT,” Cloudflare stated. “This was not an attack. The change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.”
Those affected were gaming platforms, as well as DoorDash, video streaming service Crunchyroll, and Dexcom, a company that provides glucose monitoring for patients diagnosed with diabetes.
First-hand experiences were reported by the media. For instance, there’s Mike Chapple, a cybersecurity expert who assisted, stating that the consumers’ devices won’t connect directly. Instead, it connects to the nearest Cloudflare servers, increasing speeds for users and protecting the site “from a flood of traffic.”
Word from the CTO
And, to even ensure the public, the Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare, Dane Knecht posted on Twitter that the company is “aware of the issue impacting the availability of Cloudfare’s network.”
“We are aware of the issue impacting the availability of Cloudflare’s network. It was not an attack; root cause was disabling some logging to help mitigate this week’s React CVE,” Knecht wrote. “Will share full details in a blog post today. Sites should be back online now, but I understand the frustration this causes and the work being.”
But then, again, people are not happy with the situation, even if the incident happened just past midnight.
“While issues can happen and it is bound to happen, don’t you guys have a staging (UAT) environment where you can test, before pushing the changes to the PROD?” software engineer @vivek_naskar commented on the post.
Cloudflare’s services work in the background of several websites. It is a content delivery network that mirrors content from sites to servers internationally.
DoorDash is a platform where you could order food and more, delivered straight to your doorstep within minutes. Customers could track their orders via the app, too. Meanwhile, “Fortnite” is a popular online video game developed by Epic Games that includes multiple game modes, most famously the free-to-play Battle Royale mode, wherein several players battle to be the last one standing. The game also features other modes, such as Save the World, a paid cooperative mode, as well as Creative, where players can build their own games and dimensions.