On June 21, 2022, a major service outage at Cloudflare rendered a significant portion of the internet inaccessible for users globally. The disruption affected a wide array of popular online services and platforms that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure for content delivery and security, causing widespread connectivity errors for millions.

The Root Cause: A Configuration Change

Cloudflare reported that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. The company attributed the disruption to a change it made to its network configuration in some of its main data centers. This change was part of a long-running project intended to increase resilience in its busiest locations. The incident was classified internally by Cloudflare as a P0, the highest priority level, and service was restored after the problematic configuration change was identified and rolled back by engineering teams.

Impact of a Centralized Infrastructure

The event highlighted the widespread dependence on Cloudflare’s services, which include its content delivery network (CDN) and DDoS mitigation. When Cloudflare’s network failed, so did the multitude of websites and applications that depend on it. Prominent services that experienced downtime included the communication platform Discord, e-commerce giant Shopify, and services for connected fitness devices like Fitbit and Peloton. Several cryptocurrency exchanges also became unavailable to their users during the incident. The cascading failure demonstrated how a problem at a single major infrastructure provider can have a global impact on the digital economy.