Websites for financial services organisations such as the FCA and MoneyHelper were knocked offline on Tuesday following reported problems at US internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
Cloudflare, a global content delivery network operating hundreds of data centres across more than 100 countries, suffered a widespread outage that disrupted access to numerous major platforms, including X and ChatGPT.
In a status update, Cloudflare said: “Cloudflare is experiencing an internal service degradation. Some services may be intermittently impacted. We are focused on restoring service. We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.
“We are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts.
“During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect.
“We have made changes that have allowed Cloudflare Access and WARP to recover. Error levels for Access and WARP users have returned to pre-incident rates. We have re-enabled WARP access in London.
“We are continuing to work towards restoring other services. We are continuing working on restoring service for application services customers.
“We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact
“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.
“Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard. We are working on a fix to resolve this, and continuing to monitor for any further issues.
“We are continuing to monitor for any further issues.”
SmartSearch chief technology and product officer Stuart Morris says: “The irony of Cloudflare – one of several major key internet infrastructure service providers – being hit by outages is not lost on the digital community. Cloudflare services include “edge computing” and tools to protect websites from cyberattacks which help them stay online during distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and heavy traffic periods.
“In the past 12 months, internet services – from AWS to Crowdstrike – seem to be succumbing to “outages” and perhaps, attacks from bad actors. Trust in these types of services is hard fought and regularly taken for granted by end users, and it is imperative for the sake of the brands who keep us safe every day that more is done to support them when things go wrong. In periods of political turmoil and in an increasingly digitalised world, more needs to be done to verify identities and fortify security. Digital identity should be an area of particular concern, especially as identity is increasingly commoditised by bad actors to conduct financial crime.
“Other than just being an inconvenience, the Cloudflare outage serves to remind us of our continued vulnerability online.”
