Cloudflare Chaos Cripples Countless Clicks
A total of 15,600 sites from Bangladesh are hosted on Cloudflare. Almost all news portals in the country use this service. However, on Tuesday, 18 November, at around 5:45 pm, due to a technical glitch, news portals faced interruptions in updating news regularly.
Along with DigiBangla, readers also faced difficulties accessing several outlets—including Daily Ittefaq, Manabzamin, and The Business Standard. Although some sites became visible again around 6:15 pm, editors struggled to work from the backend panels. Users of social platforms like X and AI service ChatGPT were also affected. Websites such as Bet365, League of Legends, and various payment companies experienced disruptions as well.
According to BuiltWith, approximately 15,601 websites from Bangladesh use Cloudflare. Specifically, around 13,866 Bangladeshi websites are listed under Cloudflare’s CDN. Analysis (Cloudflare Insight) shows that more than 1,980 Bangladeshi sites use BuiltWith’s services. While Cloudflare is used primarily for cybersecurity protection and ensuring website uptime during heavy traffic loads, the disruptions had not been resolved at the time of writing this report.
The glitch also caused many popular websites worldwide to suddenly go offline. Users attempting to access X (formerly Twitter) or the film review platform Letterboxd encountered an error message saying that the page could not be displayed due to Cloudflare issues.
Cloudflare stated, “We are aware of the customer inconvenience. The matter is under investigation, and updates will be provided as soon as possible.”
The outage-monitoring site Down Detector also crashed due to Cloudflare’s service disruption. Once restored, it showed a large number of problem reports across various websites. Users received messages indicating an “internal server error on the Cloudflare network” and were advised to “please try again in a few minutes.”
Another notice later stated: “Multiple customers are currently seeing 500 errors when attempting to load sites. Cloudflare Dashboard and API are also non-functional. We are aware of the issue. A fix is being worked on. Further updates will be shared soon.”
The disruption began around 11:30 am UK time. Some sites intermittently loaded upon refresh, but within minutes became completely inaccessible. About 15 minutes after the incident began, Cloudflare released its first update. Another 15 minutes later, it said the cause and solution were still unknown, but investigations were ongoing.
A similar outage occurred a month ago with Amazon Web Services, rendering many global websites inoperative. Initially, the company only acknowledged the issue.
DBTech/IH/OR
