ChatGPT, X and Spotify were among the big names hit by a “spike in unusual traffic” to one of Cloudflare’s services around 6:00 am ET on Tuesday.
“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” says the firm, adding: “we are all hands-on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
Customers have reported issues with contactless payments at some retailers in the UK.
,Commenting on the issues, Fadl Mantash, CISO, Tribe Payments, says: “Today’s Cloudflare outage shows how vulnerable the digital economy has become. When a single upstream provider experiences issues, the impact doesn’t stay contained; it cascades across industries, touching everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts and backend payment services.
,“Payments are particularly exposed. The infrastructure behind a single transaction relies on a chain of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authentication tools, and card schemes.”
,Thomas Gillan, CEO, BR-DGE, adds: “When an outage like this occurs, it’s not just a single site going offline, but potentially all the dependent services, from checkout pages to payment APIs and token services, that fail together.
“For merchants that rely on a single payment provider plus a single hosting or edge layer, the risk compounds: an infrastructure outage can cascade into a payments disruption, revenue loss and stalled expansion.”
The outage comes just a month after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure platform both experienced problems that left a host of sites – including banking services – offline.
In the wake of those outages, attention turned to the dependency on a heavily concentrated number of cloud providers. Microsoft Azure and AWS jointly account for more than half (55%) of the cloud computing market.
Following the AWS incident, the UK government announced it would publish a plan for handling future outages. Minister for digital government and data, Ian Murray, stated that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology would “set out a clear approach” to dealing with cybersecurity incidents and outages before the end of the year.
