London (Agencies) – Cloudflare, a company specializing in internet traffic protection and performance services, posted an incident notice on Monday about elevated latency affecting a subset of HTTP requests in its Newark (EWR), New Jersey datacenter. The company said some customers using its Data Loss Prevention (DLP) suite could experience intermittent traffic errors for traffic in that datacenter.
Users reported service problems via the DownDetector outage tracking platform. Other users also reported difficulties accessing platforms including X and Amazon Web Services. However, there has been no official confirmation that these outages were directly related to Cloudflare’s datacenter incident notice.
Identify the problem and begin troubleshooting
Cloudflare said it detected the issue and began implementing mitigations. Later updates indicated the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented, with continued work to fully resolve it.
The company did not immediately disclose the precise root cause or the full extent of any customer impact.
Update (Feb 18): In the days following the incident, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince criticized what he described as false outage reports linked to Downdetector spikes and suggested the company could consider legal action. Reporting also highlighted how crowdsourced outage trackers can sometimes show broad “spikes” across many services at once, even when only one platform is experiencing a real disruption.
A pivotal role in the structure of the Internet
Cloudflare is a key player in the global internet infrastructure. It provides tools to protect against cyberattacks and accelerate content loading by routing data traffic to the nearest servers for users. Thousands of small websites rely on its free services, while larger platforms opt for more comprehensive paid plans.
The company previously experienced an outage last November due to a software system failure, which caused widespread disruptions.
The cloud computing sector has also seen a series of high-profile outages in recent months, including problems with Amazon Web Services in October, followed by a glitch in Microsoft’s Azure system. A global crisis also occurred in the summer of 2024 following an outage at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which affected airlines, hospitals, and other vital services.
These incidents highlight the increasing reliance on a limited number of large companies to operate and manage the digital infrastructure of the global economy.
