Cloudflare outage causes service disruptions with users reporting issues

Users of the U.S. web infrastructure service Cloudflare are reporting outages. Cloudflare has acknowledged the issue and said it is currently working to restore service.

“Cloudflare is investigating issues with our services and/or network. Users may experience errors or timeouts reaching Cloudflare’s network or services,” the company said on its website.

Cloudflare is a web infrastructure and security service used by many websites and apps. The service helps websites and apps load faster and protects them from traffic overloads and cyberattacks.

Users reported having trouble with UberEats and sports betting site Bet365 on Friday afternoon. Some users on Reddit also complained that they were having trouble using the Steam PC gaming service due to Cloudflare issues.

Cloudflare issued an update at 2:45pm Eastern Time, noting that it was continuing to restore service to users.

“Cloudflare is continuing to work on restoring service for impacted customers to what it was before the outage,” it said in a statement.

The company noted in earlier updates that it was performing scheduled maintenance at a Portland data center on Friday, but it is unclear if the maintenance contributed to the outages.

Friday’s outage does not appear to be nearly as widespread as the outage that occurred in November, when thousands of internet users lost access to major sites like X, ChatGPT, and numerous news and media websites. E-commerce hub Shopify and file transfer service Dropbox were also affected by the November outage.

Cloudflare experienced a second major, though short-lived, outage a few weeks later on December 5.

During the November outage, users reporting disruptions to DownDetector peaked at 11,000. As of Friday afternoon, Cloudflare outage reports on DownDetector peaked at less than 500.

Cloudflare posted messages addressing both the November and December outages on its “Cloudflare Help” X account, but has not posted anything about Friday’s outage as of 3:30pm EST.

Outage reports on DownDetector peaked at around 2pm EST and began to fall shortly after.