Key Points
- Cloudflare shares slipped on Friday after global websites briefly went down.
- The company quickly rolled out a fix and is now monitoring stability.
- The outage follows a similar Cloudflare crash less than three weeks ago.
Cloudflare shares fell early Friday after a fresh wave of global website outages sent users scrambling and raised new concerns about the reliability of one of the internet’s most important infrastructure companies.
The U.S.-based firm said it was investigating issues affecting its dashboard and related apps. Minutes later, Cloudflare announced it had “implemented a fix” and was watching closely to make sure everything stabilized.
The company’s stock initially dropped as much as 4.5% in premarket trading but trimmed those losses after the fix went live, and was recently down about 2%.
Several major sites were caught in the disruption, including outage tracker Downdetector, LinkedIn, crypto exchange Coinbase, and online publishing platform Substack — all of which appeared to be affected by the underlying Cloudflare issue.
Friday’s incident adds to growing frustration, coming less than three weeks after a similar Cloudflare crash triggered widespread error messages across the internet. At the time, Cloudflare called that outage “unacceptable,” noting the critical role it plays in powering the web.
Cloudflare — What It Actually Does
Cloudflare’s software supports roughly 20% of all internet traffic, helping businesses manage and secure their websites. One of its key functions is protecting against massive DDoS attacks — attempts by hackers to overwhelm a website with so much fake traffic that it stops working entirely.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
