Cloudflare (NET.US) falls before the market opens, network failure causes multiple websites to crash again and then be fixed.

Internet security company Cloudflare (NET.US) has stated that it has fixed an issue that caused multiple banks, Shopify (SHOP.US), Zoom (ZM.US), LinkedIn, and other websites to go offline on Friday. Cloudflare said on its status page on Friday that "the fix has been implemented, and we are monitoring the results." The same page showed that earlier in the day, Cloudflare's dashboard and related APIs had experienced issues. Cloudflare's stock fell 6% in pre-market trading on Friday, but the drop had narrowed to over 2% by the time of writing. Cloudflare's software is used by tens of thousands of companies worldwide, serving as a buffer between company websites and end-users and working to protect company websites from potential attacks that could lead to traffic overload. Due to its widespread use, many popular websites become unavailable or unreliable when Cloudflare experiences outages. On November 19, Cloudflare confirmed that a system crash was caused by an abnormal configuration file on the Tuesday morning of that week, leading to access issues for a large number of global websites and applications, including X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and others. Ironically, Cloudflare's own outage status page was also inaccessible at one point. This incident occurred less than a month after the AWS "US-EAST-1" region failure by Amazon.com, Inc., sparking discussions within the industry about the risks of centralized infrastructure dependence. Cloudflare stated that it would review its configuration management processes and strengthen redundancy design to prevent similar incidents from happening again. In fact, this is not Cloudflare's first major outage. Its system has faced multiple incidents in the past. In July 2019, a vulnerability in Cloudflare's software led to a depletion of the company's computing resources, causing downtime for thousands of websites that relied on its services for up to 30 minutes. Affected websites at the time included the blogging platform Medium, gaming chat service Discord, e-commerce platform Shopify, music service SoundCloud, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and online storage service Dropbox, among others. In June 2022, Cloudflare experienced another outage that affected 19 data centers handling the majority of its global traffic, resulting in several mainstream websites and services being paralyzed for about an hour and a half.