Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, faced an outage affecting many online services and websites worldwide on October 18. The company initially reported performance degradation in internal services, with intermittent impacts on some services, while efforts were made for recovery. After about 90 minutes, Cloudflare deactivated the WARP service in London, consequently blocking user access in that region. As soon as the issue was identified, WARP access was reinstated, but numerous websites continued to show error messages like “Internal Server Error 500.”
About three hours post-incident, Cloudflare announced ongoing recovery efforts for application service clients. During this time, Downdetector.com reported a sharp increase in global service outage reports, coinciding with the timing of the Cloudflare disruption. Notable platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Canva, also reported issues traced back to Cloudflare. Although Cloudflare recognized the global network disruption only 31 minutes later, they had already indicated problems on their support portal earlier in the day.
While evidence linking the support portal outage to the CDN service failure is not yet available, the incident highlights increasing concerns over third-party service vulnerabilities. Recent months have seen IT vendors face attacks due to such vulnerabilities, with high-profile breaches reported in platforms like Discord and Salesforce. Moreover, a recent Verizon report indicated that 71% of CISOs experienced third-party security incidents in the past year, underlining the urgent need for improved risk management strategies.
👉 Pročitaj original: CIO Magazine
