Several websites down after Cloudflare outage

Core Points - Several major websites, including Linkedin, Zoom, and Canva, experienced outages due to issues with Cloudflare, a web infrastructure provider [1][2] - Cloudflare reported that it was investigating problems with its Dashboard and related APIs, which resulted in a significant number of empty pages [1] - Despite implementing a fix, many websites remained inaccessible throughout the morning, with DownDetector recording over 4,500 reports of issues related to Cloudflare [2][3] Company Impact - Cloudflare provides network and security services for a substantial portion of the internet, claiming that around 20% of all websites utilize its services [3] - Previous outages in November affected over 10,000 users across various platforms, including X, Spotify, and ChatGPT, indicating a recurring issue with Cloudflare's services [3][4] - The company has faced similar challenges in the past, including a major outage in October linked to AWS, highlighting vulnerabilities in its service infrastructure [5] Industry Insights - The incident underscores the reliance on major providers like Cloudflare, where a failure can render thousands of websites unreachable, pointing to a significant single point of failure in the current internet infrastructure [6] - Cybersecurity experts emphasize the need for improvements in network design to mitigate risks associated with legacy systems that direct internet traffic [6]