A Cloudflare outage briefly took down large swathes of the internet

A brief outage at Cloudflare took down hundreds of websites worldwide earlier today, many of which were left utterly inaccessible to the general public. These included websites like Canva, Discord, Steamyard, and many more.

Cloudflare quickly acknowledged the outage via a tweet and announced that it was working on a fix soon after. The issue now seems to have been resolved for most websites affected by the issue.

According to Downdetector, Cloudflare’s technology powers numerous other sites and services across the internet. The outage seemed to impact various sites, including Shopify, Grindr, FitBit, and Peleton.

The issues were most problematic for users of Cloudflare’s DNS lookup service. DownDetector had suggested that reported outages were for multiple websites, including Discord, Shopify, Zerodha, Amazon Web Services, Twitter, Canva, and even popular open-world game Genshin Impact and battle royale shooting game Valorant.

Other websites like Splunk, Quora, Udemy, and Crunchyroll were also down. Cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase, FTX, WazirX, Bitfinex, and OKX were also affected. Most of these websites are now up and running for users.

The Cloudflare CDN is powering a large number of websites and services around the world. A report by W3Techs, a Web technology survey company, shows Cloudflare leads the market of CDNs globally, surpassing competitors including Amazon CloudFront and Akamai. However, this domination is the reason for the mass outage.