Cloudflare’s latest outage takes down White House, Federal Reserve, crypto exchange websites

The Cloudflare internet service went offline again, taking most websites and apps down with it. However, this time the outage was resolved within 10 minutes, a stark contrast to the November 18 catastrophe.

Cloudflare said on Friday it had deployed a fix for a disruption that affected its dashboard and connected applications, but did not mention the problem that caused websites to display a “500 internal server error.”

The company published an update on its status page, noting it had “implemented a fix” and was “monitoring system behavior” while services went back online. 

The disruption caused outages in several websites, including tracking service Downdetector, social platforms LinkedIn, Substack, and centralized crypto exchange Coinbase.

Cryptopolitan received several reports of webpages that failed to load, login interruptions, and sudden timeouts.

Decentralized crypto platforms on Solana report failures

Several protocols on the Solana network, including Jupiter Exchange, Raydium, and Meteora, reported user interface failures during Cloudflare’s service hiatus. According to community account SolanaFloor, the platforms insisted their backends were operational but said customers were unable to interact with live market information or initiate on-chain actions.

“Wanted to check if Cloudflare is down again -> went to downdetector(.)com…. … Downdetectors run on Cloudflare too, apparently,” joked AI developer Pietro Montaldo.

Cloudflare had published a status update at 09:38 UTC, saying its team was investigating a surge of empty page results when customers accessed a list API on a Workers KV namespace. The notice also mentioned the internet service firm was probing the cause of the malfunction. 

A separate update posted five minutes earlier confirmed engineers had “detected error levels for customers running Workers scripts,” and they were working to analyze and contain the issue.

Cloudflare services down for the second time in a month 

Friday’s downtime comes after the company experienced an outage on November 18 at 11:20 UTC, when the global network began failing to deliver core traffic caused by a database permissions malfunction.

According to Cloudflare’s explanation outlined in its blog post, the incorrect permissions forced the database to generate several entries in a “feature file” used by its Bot Management system. 

The file doubled in size and exceeded the limit supported by routing software on the network responsible for processing huge volumes of global internet traffic, which inevitably crashed.

Engineers had suspected there was some form of foul play, but later discovered the real cause and halted propagation of the oversized file, replacing it with an earlier version to restore normal function. 

According to Cryptopolitan’s report, core traffic recovered by 14:30, and teams spent several hours afterward resolving increased pressure on systems as global traffic came back.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today,” Cloudflare apologized.

Several large centralized cryptocurrency platforms rely heavily on Cloudflare to stabilize traffic loads. BitMEX reported disruptions during the outage, while blockchain services linked to Toncoin also experienced delays and downtime. 

Should crypto services walk away from Content Delivery Networks?

Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare are two of the most used content delivery networks (CDNs) that platforms, including crypto exchanges, rely on. When AWS went down in October,  Coinbase’s Base network and infrastructure provider Infura, which supports numerous blockchain applications, were taken offline temporarily. 

The sequence of failures is one more reason why crypto-affiliated entities should consider going fully decentralized, according to Tribe Payments chief security officer Fadl Mantash.

“The infrastructure behind a single transaction relies on a chain of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authentication tools, and card schemes. When any link in that chain fails, the entire journey can break,” Mantash denoted.

Even though blockchains themselves may continue to process transactions, traders will not be able to see the activity or interact with their assets in the event that Cloudflare or AWS is disrupted. 

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