Why a Cloudflare Outage Can Take Down the Internet

If you went on the internet Tuesday morning, you likely experienced some issues. Popular sites like X and ChatGPT were unresponsive, returning error messages rather than their usual homepages. The culprit? A massive Cloudflare outage.

The upside is that the outage appears to be ending. Cloudflare says it has identified the problem and issued a fix, so affected websites should be coming back online this morning. But that doesn't change the fact that so many websites went dark today, all because one company experienced unexplained downtime. How is it that a Cloudflare outage can seemingly break the internet?

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers a number of products for sites and services with the goals of improving traffic performance and reliability, as well as cybersecurity. A company like Cloudflare spreads its network out throughout the globe, so that when users try to visit a website, the server they ping is the one closest to them. Rather than all users attempting to visit your server at once, they go through their Cloudflare server local.

This serves two main purposes: First, it limits the demand on your site. If all users were trying to ping your server at once, it puts a strain on your network, and could either slow things down or shut them down completely. Routing users to the Cloudflare server closest to them spreads out the demand, and reduces the risk of interruption. In addition, users are less likely to experience delays in physical distance to your network: If you're based in Japan, and your user is based in New York, it's going to take them longer to reach your server than it would a user from South Korea. However, if that New York user instead connects to a Cloudflare server closest to them, they can access your data much more quickly.

Why does Cloudflare affect so many websites?

Cloudflare's goal is to improve the experience for users around the world to visit international websites—so why does it seem like half the internet went dark when Cloudflare experienced an outage?

The reason is because so many websites use Cloudflares services. According to Backlinko, over 24 million websites actively rely on Cloudflare in some capacity. That includes over 4,300 of the 10,000 "most popular" websites around the world. The U.S. alone has nearly 2,470,000 million websites relying on Cloudflare, while the UK has almost 780,000. Many other countries, like Brazil, Germany, Russia, Australia, Canada, China, India, and France, each have hundreds of thousands of websites running on Cloudflare.

There are over one billion websites out there in the world, which means a total Cloudflare outage would account for roughly 2% of global websites' connectivity issues. However, if Backlinko's stats are correct, a huge percentage of popular websites rely on Cloudflare. Sure, the vast majority of websites may remain unaffected by this outage, but nearly half of the sites people most often visit have problems here. If you primarily visit U.S. websites, that number may be even higher.

It's a similar reason why an AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage takes down so many websites. AWS provides cloud computing services for so many companies and websites, that when issues pop-up, you experience problems with your favorite websites. It poses a logistical question for how the global internet currently works: Yes, it's great that services like Cloudflare make it possible to reliably access international websites as if they were within your region—but if too much of the internet leans on it, is it really all that reliable?

View the full article