Dec 5 : Cloudflare has restored impacted software services after a minor outage on Friday hampered access to crypto trading exchange Coinbase and Anthropic’s artificial intelligence chatbot Claude AI.
The web-infrastructure company’s shares fell as much as 4.5 per cent in premarket trading, as the disruption came less than a month after a widespread outage prevented thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare’s outage between 0847 GMT and about 0913 GMT on Friday was not an attack, but caused by a change made to how its firewall handles requests, the company said.
“The change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components.”
Both Coinbase and Claude AI confirmed that the outage was resolved.
React, a tool used to build user interfaces, had disclosed a vulnerability in its application on Wednesday that could potentially allow unauthenticated, malicious code to be run on a system.
Reports about issues with Cloudflare dropped to about 120 by 06:10 a.m. ET (1110 GMT) from a peak of nearly 2,000, outage-tracking tool Downdetector showed. Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, and the actual number of affected users may vary.
A rise in outages has raised concerns about organizations’ dependence on a few vendors for wide-ranging security and web solutions, and whether they have contingency plans when issues emerge from a single point of failure.
In October, an outage at Amazon’s cloud service made thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit, inaccessible.
Last year, a global tech outage related to issues at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and Microsoft hit various sectors.