Why were so many websites down on Tuesday morning?

If you’ve tried to log onto many popular websites or mobile applications this morning, you will have noticed that many were or are still down.

Popular sites and services around the world, inclusive in Malta were impacted. Examples of websites down include Times of Malta, Gwida, the Malta Financial Services Authority, The Central Bank of Malta, Discord, DoorDash, Feedly, Bolt, DownDetector and many more.

The reason behind this is a widespread outage at Cloudflare, one of the world’s major content delivery networks which also provides Distributed Denial-of-Service protection to online domains, speed optimisation and various cybersecurity services.

In essence, the firm provides a ‘reverse proxy’ service, meaning it provides the application that sits in front of back-end applications, and forwards client (e.g browser) requests to those applications.

Reverse proxies serve to help increase scalability, performance, resilience and security.

The US company counts millions of customers worldwide, including major enterprise firms.

When considering the scope and scale of Cloudflare, network outage at the company is felt across the internet.

Problems were first reported at 6.43am (UTC), or 8.43am (CET – Malta time).

Cloudflare wrote that it is investigating a critical incident with connectivity in the company’s network, which has been disrupted in broad regions.

“Customers attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network.”

At 8.57am local time, it said it had identified the issue and a fix was being implemented.