Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare suffered another major glitch on Friday: A morning outage temporarily brought down several global websites—including LinkedIn and Zoom—the second such crash in less than three weeks. Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved and was not due to an attack. A change to how its firewall handles requests "caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning," the company said, per the AP.
It said it was "investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs," or application programming interfaces that allow software systems to communicate with each other. Cybersecurity experts say it generally takes time to pinpoint the exact cause of an outage. But based on Cloudflare's initial statements, Friday's incident came "down to a database change they had made as part of planned maintenance that just went slightly awry," according to Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, a Europe and Africa-based cybersecurity firm. It "effectively overloaded their systems," he said.
Cloudflare isn't alone. Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft, and other services. Amazon also experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. "This is one of the things that we are going to see more and more," said Ford. "We are seeing the frequency increase as organizations put more eggs in fewer baskets, and as the complexity and the size and scale (grow) of operations like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare."
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