Cloudflare outage hits M&S and other sites

Shortly after 11.30am this morning, internet users reported issues in their thousands to outage monitoring site Downdetector.

Cloudflare provides a host of internet services including a content delivery network, domain services as well as security in the form of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service – a form of cyber-attack protection).

Cloudflare explained that this was due to “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11.20[am] UTC”,  which would affect any internet traffic using its network.

At 11.48am, Cloudflare posted on its service status page: “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”

Marks & Spencer‘s checkout has been affected, as has AI service ChatGPT, which for some users displayed an error message stating “please unblock challenges cloudfare.com to proceed”.

Certain users on social media platform X were presented with a message on its homepage citing an internal server issue because of a Cloudflare “error”.

At 2.42pm, Cloudflare said in a statement: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

However, it added at 14.57pm that “some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard”.