Cloudflare goes down, and takes the internet’s security blanket with it

When Cloudflare has problems, the rest of the internet can’t be that far behind. 

The company whose entire raison d’être is ensuring the reliability of companies’ websites and internet-connected services had a bit of online trouble itself Friday. In a late afternoon statement, the company confirmed that at least some of its clients were having a bad day. 

“We are aware that some regions may be experiencing issues with some Cloudflare services,” announced the company. “We are currently investigating.”

We reached out to Cloudfare in an effort to determine what, specifically, had gone wrong and how many clients are currently affected. We received no immediate response. However, a company status page claims the “issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

At the time of this writing, Downdetector (which is owned by Mashable’s parent company J2) shows Cloudflare’s issues concentrated in the U.S. and northern Europe. 

While Cloudflare struggles to get its services fully functioning again, the internet delighted in the sight of a company that sells DDoS protection not being able to keep itself online — and, correspondingly, much of the internet struggling as a result. 

Services like Discord where among those reporting problems — likely as a result of Cloudflare’s outages. 

This is not the first time Cloudfare has run into trouble. In 2017, the company reported “observing network performance issues.”