Cloudflare (NET.US) fixed it after dropping network problems before the market and causing several websites to go down

The Zhitong Finance App learned that the internet security company Cloudflare (NET.US) said it had fixed an issue that caused several banks, Shopify (SHOP.US), Zoom (ZM.US), and LinkedIn to go down on Friday. “Fixes have been implemented and we are monitoring the results,” Cloudflare said on its status page on Friday. The same page shows that there were issues with the Cloudflare dashboard and related APIs earlier in the day. Cloudflare's US stock fell 6% before the market on Friday, and the decline had narrowed to more than 2% as of press time.

Cloudflare's software is used by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world to act as a buffer between the company's website and end users, and is committed to protecting the company's website from attacks that could overload traffic. Due to its widespread use, many popular websites go down or become unreliable when Cloudflare goes down.

On November 19, Cloudflare confirmed that the system crashed due to an abnormal configuration file in the early morning of Tuesday of the same week, causing access problems to a large number of websites and apps around the world, such as X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and Canva. Ironically, Cloudflare's own fault status page never opened. The outage was less than a month away from Amazon's AWS “US-EAST-1” regional failure, which once again sparked discussions in the industry about the risk of reliance on centralized infrastructure. Cloudflare said at the time that it would review the configuration management process and strengthen the redundant design to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

In fact, this isn't Cloudflare's first large-scale outage; its system has been “hit” many times. In July 2019, a vulnerability in Cloudflare's software caused part of its network to exhaust the company's computing resources, causing thousands of websites around the world that relied on its services to be down for up to 30 minutes. Websites that were seriously affected at the time included well-known platforms such as the blog platform Medium, the game chat service Discord, the e-commerce platform Shopify, the music service SoundCloud, the Bitcoin trading platform Coinbase, and the online storage service Dropbox.

In June 2022, Cloudflare experienced another failure, affecting 19 data centers that handle most of its global traffic, causing many mainstream websites and services to be paralyzed. The incident continued for about an hour and a half.