Most internet users hadn’t even heard of the company Cloudflare until Tuesday, November 18. While trying to load X.com (formerly Twitter), Canva.com and other online tools, they were met with a confusing message that read, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” So, what exactly is Cloudflare, and how does it affect your daily work life?
Less than a month ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down, leading to a worldwide internet outage that impacted banks, airlines and other essential businesses in late October.
Here, learn everything you need to know about Cloudflare, its purpose and its outage.
Cloudflare Outage Update: Is it Still Down?
At the time of publication, people are still seeing errors while trying to load any system backed by Cloudflare, including X.com and Canva.
What Is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a content delivery network as well as a cybersecurity provider. The company is based in San Francisco, California, and specializes in cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, reverse proxies and Domain Name Service.
How Is Cloudflare Connected to X.com?
Since Cloudflare is a cybersecurity services provider, X likely uses the network for this purpose. X boss Elon Musk has yet to publicly comment on the Cloudflare failure.
Is Cloudflare Still Down?
Yes, for many users of X.com, Canva and other Cloudflare-backed platforms, the system is still down. On its status page, Cloudflare acknowledged that it was “experiencing an internal service degradation” earlier in the morning hours of November 18.
“Some services may be intermittently impacted,” the company noted at around 8:30 a.m. ET. “We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”
Cloudflare announced that a “fix” was accomplished, but the company was still “monitoring” for any more issues during the day.
“A fix has been implemented, and we believe the incident is now resolved,” Cloudflare’s status page indicated just after 9:00 a.m. ET. “We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”
