Internet users around the world on Friday experienced widespread disruption due to connectivity issues affecting multiple applications that depend on the web infrastructure firm Cloudflare.
Cloudflare experienced downtime from around 10 am, which lasted for about two hours and disrupted internet services across several applications, including the online graphic design tool Canva.
Other affected sites included professional networking platform LinkedIn, internet outage tracking website Downdetector and some digital taxi apps, leaving several people stranded.
In a brief statement shortly after the incident, Cloudflare said that scheduled maintenance was in progress and urged users to be patient.
The web infrastructure company also clarified that it was investigating issues with its dashboard and related application programming interfaces (APIs) to resolve the problem.
"Cloudflare is investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace. We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem," it said.
Cloudflare provides key internet infrastructure services, including protecting websites from cyberattacks and ensuring they remain accessible during periods of high traffic.
After about an hour of the outage, Cloudflare said that it had fixed the connectivity after the outage drew public concerns.
The outage comes less than three weeks after a similar Cloudflare downtime caused widespread disruption, with users receiving error messages when attempting to access various applications and websites.
In the November 18 outage, major platforms, including X, Canva, Grindr and ChatGPT, were inaccessible for thousands of users globally.
While confirming the outage, Cloudflare said there was a spike in unusual traffic to one of its services beginning at 2:20 pm, which had caused errors for traffic passing through its network.
"We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors," Cloudflare said in a statement.
