One of the software companies dominating the business of “internet traffic,” Cloudflare, was down due to technical issues in their servers on Nov. 18, which affected many students and staff at West Chicago Community High School.
Cloudflare is an American-based company that provides various internet services, including cybersecurity, privacy servers, and content delivery networks. These services are vital for any company under Cloudflare to run smoothly and safely for its users; a reported 20% of every internet website is run by Cloudflare.
The issues were first reported to the servers at circa 5:30 a.m. according to the New York Times and resolved four hours after, at around 9:30 a.m. for certain companies, including OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT.
National Honor Society members held one of their monthly meetings at 7 a.m. in the community room of WEGO, where Vice President Cristal Salinas reported having issues with the Canva website, a service that uses Cloudflare’s servers. Adviser Leslie Fireman reported technical errors as well.
The Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare, Dane Knecht, released a statement earlier Tuesday morning, denying that the outage was related to a cybersecurity attack.
“Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation of our network and other services. This was not an attack,” Knecht tweeted in an X post.
Some users of Cloudflare services thought the outage was connected to a separate incident in October, when Amazon Web Services shut down and caused outages for Amazon, Netflix, and several government websites.
Although the issues have been reportedly resolved, there are lingering effects of the outage in many websites and in the stock market; the company’s shares fell from the previous close $202.25 to $187.47, and in the late morning, it rose back up to a starting of $197.15. The stock overall fell about 5% in what is called premarket trading.
The outage highlighted the vulnerability of websites that rely on massive servers such as Cloudflare and what could happen if one little thing goes wrong, as many experienced this morning.
