Cloudflare Outage Paralyzed Major Online Operators

American company Cloudflare, which powers around 20% of websites worldwide, experienced an outage on November 18 at approximately 11:00 GMT, disrupting the operations of major operators such as Stake, Bet365, McLuck, Pulsz, and Sidepot.

Nature of the Outage and Its Impact

Users encountered “you’re blocked” messages and were unable to access the sites until roughly 14:30 GMT. Deposits and withdrawals through APIs stopped working due to issues with payment systems like Paystack. The outage also affected major services and social networks, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, and Amazon.

Causes and Cloudflare’s Explanation

Cloudflare’s CTO, Dane Knecht, explained that the outage was caused by a “planned configuration update” that brought down the network. A cyberattack was ruled out.

Internal investigation revealed that a latent bug in the service responsible for bot mitigation was triggered by a routine configuration change. This led to a cascading failure across Cloudflare’s network and other services. The company emphasized that the incident was not an attack.

Impact on Users and Network

• Inability to access operator websites and process deposits through APIs.
• Disruption of global services and social platforms.
• Interruption of major payment systems.
• Temporary restricted access to digital resources for millions of users.

Cloudflare’s Response and Preventive Measures

The company stressed that the incident was unacceptable and is taking steps to prevent similar problems in the future. CTO Dane Knecht apologized for the inconvenience and highlighted that customer trust remains the company’s top priority.

Cloudflare plans to publish a detailed report on the outage and recovery actions so users can see all steps taken and the results of the investigation.