The outage literally broke the internet (Image: Shutterstock, Cloudflare)

Cloudflare went down today and vast numbers of websites around the world went down with it.

The company provides cloud computing services to millions of customers, meaning that a lot of sites and services were not working this afternoon.

One of these is Down Detector, which tracks outages, meaning people couldn’t even see if the website they wanted to visit is working properly.

The chat service Discord also stopped working as well as a number of other prominent pages.


One cryptocurrency site even suggested the outage caused a minor panic by falsely showing people the price of Bitcoin had plummeted.



Matthew Price, Cloudflare CEO, tweeted: ‘Aware of major @Cloudflare issues impacting us network-wide. Team is working on getting to the bottom of what’s going on. Will continue to update.’

Unable to check Down Detector for updates, people took to Twitter in a quest for answers.

‘Sure is great that when Cloudflare goes down it takes half the Internet with it,’ one person wrote.

Another roared: ‘Typical illustration of how bad the internet is centralized nowadays: Cloudflare is down, most websites & services being disrupted by this.’

DownDetector is unable to tell if cloudflare is down because cloudflare is down. 🙃 pic.twitter.com/pBSgv9QISc — Tarjei Husøy (@t_husoy) July 2, 2019

Waiting for Cloudflare to get our site back up like pic.twitter.com/0xEp7XcqPh — BookTrib (@BookTrib) July 2, 2019

The outage caused problems with the cryptocurrency website Coindesk, which tweeted: ‘ Due to a Cloudflare outage, we’re getting bad data from our providers, which is showing incorrect crypto prices.

‘Calm down everyone, Bitcoin is not $26.’

The outage appears to have been resolved now.

Price added: ‘Appear to have mitigated the issue causing the outage. Traffic restored. Working now to restore all services globally. More details to come as we have them.’