Cloudflare Service Outage Disrupts Internet; Fix in Place

Mark Bergen (Bloomberg) -- Cloudflare Inc. suffered an outage on Friday, disrupting some parts of the internet. The company said it identified the problem and a fix is in place.

Cloudflare provides important services for the internet to function, such as load balancing, security, domain registration and video streaming. When the company experiences technical snafus, that can reverberate across the web.

“This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack,” the company said in a blog post. “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.”

The problems affected 12 data centers in the U.S. and Europe, according to Cloudflare. Several online businesses, including digital storefront operator Shopify Inc., reported disruptions.

The outage even impacted Downdetector.com, a service that is supposed to report problems with sites across the web.

“What turned out to be an issue at Cloudflare took down a large number of websites and online services,” Downdetector owner Ookla said in a blog post. “Downdetector was also briefly impacted by Cloudfare’s outage, during which time users in the U.S. and Europe were unable to reach the site.”