Cloudflare says service restored after outage that brought down sites including Zoom and LinkedIn

MADRID — Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it had restored services following an outage that took place in the morning and brought down several global websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks.

Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved and was not due to an attack. A change to how its firewall handles requests “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,” the company said.

It said it was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,” or application programming interface that allow software systems to communicate with each other.

Cybersecurity experts say it generally takes time to pinpoint the exact cause of an outage.

But based on Cloudflare's initial statements, Friday's incident came "down to a database change they had made as part of planned maintenance that just went slightly awry," according to Richard Ford, chief technology officer at Integrity360, a Europe and Africa-based cybersecurity firm.

It "effectively overloaded their systems," he said.

Edinburgh airport had to shut down briefly on Friday morning. But the airport later said the outage was a localized issue that was not related to Cloudflare.

In November, a three-hour Cloudflare outage affected users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, “League of Legends,” to the New Jersey Transit system.

Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.

Amazon also experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October.

“This is one of the things that we are going to see more and more,” said cybersecurity expert Ford. “We are seeing the frequency increase as organizations put more eggs in fewer baskets, and as the complexity and the size and scale (grow) of operations like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare.”