Triple Shocker: How AWS, Cloudflare, and Microsoft outages sent ripples across the web

A technical issue with Cloudflare rocked the tech world on Tuesday as a number of popular platforms including X, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and others came crashing down. However, this isn't the first such incident where reliance on a major company led to other popular platforms going down, and there have been plenty of such instances this year alone.

Given that this system is linked to other parts of Cloudflare’s network, the issue quickly spread and led to widespread errors across other websites and apps.

Knecht also noted that Cloudflare will be sharing a detailed breakdown of what went wrong during the outage in a few hours.

“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 to our network and other services. This was not an attack,” he noted.

During the AWS outage, a major chunk of the internet went down, with the disruption lasting as long as 15 hours in some cases. Among the platforms affected were Snapchat, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, Roblox, Fortnite, Xbox, PlayStation and several Amazon services.

Amazon later clarified that the issue was caused due to “a latent defect within the service’s automated DNS management system”. AWS said that it had fixed the bug that caused the outage and added extra protections to prevent a similar outage in the future.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Azure outage, which occurred just a few days later, also affected many popular services including Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, Minecraft, Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Heathrow Airport, Costco and Starbucks.

Microsoft later confirmed that the outage was due to DNS issues, similar to the AWS outage.