An outage at a major software company brought down large parts of the internet on Tuesday.
Cloudflare offers cybersecurity and internet infrastructure services, including encryption, defense against cyberattacks, and other services, for about a fifth of all websites. Its collapse — for an as-yet unknown reason — hit social media platform X and the AI chatbots Claude and ChatGPT, among dozens of other websites.
The problem again reveals the internet’s vulnerability to single points of failure: An outage at Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud provider, disrupted banks, airlines, and other platforms in October.
Microsoft and Alphabet’s respective cloud services also had significant recent collapses that caused widespread outages.
A few major companies are “the infrastructure of the internet,” an expert told The Guardian, “so when one of them fails it becomes really obvious.”