Huge worldwide internet outage impacts major websites for the second time in a month

Parts of the internet are down once again amid yet another Cloudflare outage.

People logging on to use the content network service – as well as sites including Zoom, Canva and LinkedIn – are instead facing a 500 Internal Server Error message.

Ironically, status update site DownDetector is among the impacted pages.

The likes of ChatGPT, X, formerly Twitter, Discord and PayPal rely on Cloudflare services.

Cloudflare ‘powers internet requests for millions of websites and serves 81 million HTTP requests per second on average,’ as per its website.

It comes nearly three weeks after a separate Cloudflare outage knocked sites offline for millions of users.

What has Cloudflare said?

It’s the second Cloudflare outage in four weeks

At 9.33 UCT, Cloudflare’s System Status confirmed it was investigated ‘an increased level of errors for customers running Workers scripts.’

“We are working to analyze and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly,” they said.

Five minutes later, it said it was looking into reports of ‘a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace.’

What caused the last Cloudflare outage?

In a blog post, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explained what happened during last month’s November 18 outage.

He said the issue was not caused ‘by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,’ but was instead triggered by a change to one of the company’s database systems’ permissions.

This ’caused the database to output multiple entries into a feature file’ used by their Bot Management system.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,” Prince added at the time.

“Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable.”

This story will be updated as the situation progresses.