Internet giant Cloudflare experienced a system crash yesterday that temporarily brought down a number of popular services – from Spotify to ChatGPT and even Donald Trump’s Truth Social social network.
This is just the latest in a series of major internet outages, after a problem with Amazon Web Services disrupted the daily lives of millions of people last month, and just a few days later Microsoft’s Azure went down. CNN.
According to experts, such events are the result of a combination of society’s increasing dependence on digital services, the consolidation of key infrastructure in the hands of just a few companies, and the tendency of people to complain about technology problems online. It also shows that no one, not even the biggest tech companies, is immune to technical glitches.
“It’s almost irrelevant how well-positioned the service provider is in these cases, or even how sophisticated the IT organization and infrastructure is for a private business,” said Eileen Haggerty, vice president of IT and cybersecurity at Netscout. Technological outages like these are “very, very common problems.”
What caused Cloudflare to go down?
Cloudflare told CNN that the outage was the result of a technical problem, not a cyber attack.
The company clarified that the problem was caused by a “configuration file” intended to manage “threat traffic”. “The file grew beyond the expected input size and caused a crash in the software system that processes traffic for a number of Cloudflare services,” it said in a statement.
Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer at Cloudflare, shared more details on the X social network. In short, a routine configuration change activated the bug, which “cascaded to widespread degradation of our network and other services.” “Work is already underway to make sure this doesn’t happen again, but I know it caused real pain today,” he wrote.
Similarly, the recent outage at Amazon was caused by a bug that occurred when two automated systems tried to update the same data at the same time.
Are internet outages really becoming more frequent?
The fact that three major outages happened in less than a month is a coincidence. But Haggerty admits that they certainly seem to be happening more often, largely because of the scale of their impact.
The number of outages “remained consistent,” but “the number of websites and applications dependent on those services has increased, making them more disruptive for users,” explained Angelique Medina, head of Internet intelligence for Cisco ThousandEyes.
Cisco’s network monitoring service has recorded 12 major outages so far in 2025, not counting this Cloudflare one. For comparison, there were 23 in 2024, 13 in 2023, and 10 in 2022. As a reminder, the big Crowdstrike outage in 2024 disrupted business, air traffic and hospitals around the world, reports Index.hr.
“Outages are relatively frequent”
The impact is so great because most of the Internet relies on a few key service providers, like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, that form the backbone of the web. Problems reported to Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, topped 2.1 million on Tuesday, according to data provided to CNN by parent company Ookla. Cloudflare alone handles an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second.
IT outages are relatively common, experts say.
Twenty years ago, it was common for IT services to be down “all the time,” said Mike Chapple, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. “It wouldn’t be unusual to spend seven days at work with at least one IT service outage,” he said, noting that everyone now relies on the same large providers.
According to Cisco, among the outages in the first half of 2025, some common trends stand out: cascading failures, systems that appeared to be working despite hidden problems, and erroneous configuration changes. Although these trends are not new, Cisco states that they are “seeing more of these types of outages with more far-reaching consequences.” And it will probably happen again.
“They’re not things where you say, ‘Well, thank God that never happened to us,’” Haggerty concluded. “All of that can actually happen to any business.”
(Vijesti.ba)
