Global websites down as Cloudflare ‘investigating’ fresh issues

A host of websites, including LinkedIn, Zoom and DownDetector, went down on Friday morning after fresh issues at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare said shortly after 9am that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs (application programming interfaces)”.

The software business said users have seen “a large number of empty pages” as a result.

It added shortly after that it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is now monitoring the results.

Nevertheless, a number of websites and platforms were down, including the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.

Users also reported issues with other websites including Zoom, LinkedIn, Shopify and Canva, although many of these are now back online.

After returning online, the DownDetector website recorded more than 4,500 reports related to issues at Cloudflare.

Indian-based stock broker Groww also said it was facing technical issues “due to a global outage at Cloudflare”. Its services have now been restored.

Cloudflare provides network and security services for many online businesses in order to help their websites and applications operate.

It claims that around 20% of all websites use some form of its services.

It comes only three weeks after previous problems at Cloudflare hit the likes of X, ChatGPT, Spotify and multiplayer games, such as League of Legends.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET, said: “If a major provider like Cloudflare goes down for any reason, thousands of websites instantly become unreachable.

“The problems often lie with the fact we are using an old network to direct internet users around the world to websites but it simply highlights there is one huge single point of failure in this legacy design.”