Cloudflare restores services after minor dashboard outage

Cloudflare has restored impacted software services after a minor outage on Friday (5 December) hampered access to crypto trading exchange Coinbase and Anthropic's artificial intelligence chatbot Claude AI.

The web-infrastructure company's shares fell as much as 4.5% in premarket trading, as the disruption came less than a month after a widespread outage prevented thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare's outage between 0847 GMT and about 0913 GMT on Friday was not an attack, but caused by a change made to how its firewall handles requests, the company said.

"The change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components."

Both Coinbase and Claude AI confirmed that the outage was resolved.

React, a tool used to build user interfaces, had disclosed a vulnerability in its application on Wednesday that could potentially allow unauthenticated, malicious code to be run on a system.

Reports about issues with Cloudflare dropped to about 120 by 06:10am ET (1110 GMT) from a peak of nearly 2,000, outage-tracking tool Downdetector showed. Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, and the actual number of affected users may vary.

A rise in outages has raised concerns about organizations' dependence on a few vendors for wide-ranging security and web solutions, and whether they have contingency plans when issues emerge from a single point of failure.

In October, an outage at Amazon's cloud service made thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat and Reddit inaccessible.

Last year, a global tech outage related to issues at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and Microsoft hit various sectors.