A technical issue at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare caused widespread disruptions to major websites and online platforms on Friday morning, including X, LinkedIn, Canva, and even the monitoring site DownDetector.
Cloudflare reported the problem shortly after 9 a.m. UK time, saying it was investigating issues with the Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs. According to the Cloudflare's system status, a potential fix was implemented.
The company later confirmed the issue was not a cyberattack, but stemmed from a deliberate change to its Web Application Firewall intended to address a recently disclosed security vulnerability in React Server Components.
The change temporarily caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes. This follows a similar outage last month that left many websites inaccessible for about three hours. For more info, check out the message below.
Cloudflare's system status:
"This incident has been resolved. A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share more information as we have it today."