Expert explains why outage was so disruptive This comment from Alan Woodward, Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, explains both what Cloudflare is and why today’s outage spread so widely. “Cloudflare provides a form of internet shield, preventing some forms of attack and unwanted visits from bots, as well as acting as a global distribution network for content for its clients. Those clients include some well known names such as X, Spotify and Zoom. It supports something like 30% of the Fortune 100 companies. The downside of being a gatekeeper and distribution network for such big brands is that if this vital system fails, no one can use your service be that website or app. It’s still not clear exactly what went wrong but it looks like it was a technical malfunction within Cloudflare network. This in itself is surprising as such networks are designed to avoid single points of failure. “Although Cloudflare say their services are recovering, the high profile clients means it was highly visible and disruptive. Knock-on effects are still being felt as Cloudflare continue to investigate what happened. “This incident, as with the recent outage at AWS, shows how reliant some very important Internet based services are on a relatively few major players. It’s a double edged sword as these service providers need to be large to provide the scale and global reach required by big brands. But when they fail the impact can be significant. This won’t be the last time one of these big providers fails and the internet suffers disruption.” Andrew Griffin