Another mass internet outage as Cloudflare suddenly does down for maintenance

Thousands of internet users have flocked to social media to complain about Cloudflare being down again, as the site confirms 'maintenance is in progress'.

It comes just weeks after the content delivery network experienced technical difficulties, which resulted in websites all over the world going down.

Now, it appears the site is undergoing more problems with many websites having trouble loading for users.

When trying to access Cloudflare, users have been met with a message saying 500 Internal Server Error.

The website Downdetecter, where internet users can report issues with sites and apps, happens to run on a Cloudflare server and is currently unavailable for some users.

Taking to X, one user complained: "Wanted to check if Cloudflare was down again -> went to downtector... Downdetectors run on Cloudflare too, apparently!"

"I really like Cloudflare but two outages in a month is starting to look sloppy," another added, while a third wrote: "Yes, Cloudflare is down again. That makes 3 major global outages in a month (Amazon, Cloudflare, Cloudflare)."

Is Cloudflare down?

At 8.56am this morning, Cloudflare System Status said it was 'investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,' before adding that they were continuing to 'investigate the issue' 14 minutes later.

At 9.12am, an update said a 'fix has been implemented' and they were 'monitoring the results.'

More recently, at 9.33am, Cloudflare said it was 'investigating an increased level of errors for customers running Workers scripts,' adding that it was working to 'analyse and mitigate this problem.'

Moments later, the platform said it was 'investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.'

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a technology company used by some of the biggest websites in the world.

They provide security to websites and apps, also ensuring the performance of the sites.

Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy, which essentially makes it the public face of the website.

By providing a layer of protection between the actual website’s servers and the people making requests of those servers, it gives protection from DDoS attacks and bots.

This, in theory, ensures the smooth running and performance of websites, but, of course, leads to catastrophe if the public face goes down.

Since this is so essential to how the websites which use it operate, Cloudflare going down will lead to numerous issues until it is fixed.