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A Cloudflare outage hit websites including Zoom, Canva, and Fortnite on Friday, just weeks after the internet services provider suffered another major outage.
The incident has affected many online services, underscoring that much of the internet is dependent on IT infrastructure from a handful of providers.
Downdetector, a website that shows services affected by internet outages, reported issues across the web, including Canva, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot, and LinkedIn.
Cloudflare said it is experiencing “internal service degradation” on Friday morning, with internet users reporting that they were unable to access sites.
“Cloudflare is investigating reports of a large number of empty pages when using the list API on a Workers KV namespace,” the website read.
“Cloudflare is investigating an increased level of errors for customers running Workers scripts. We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem.”
A similar issue occurred in October after Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a technical problem that caused issues for companies connecting to AWS’s data services in the United States, impacting internet services worldwide.
The recent AWS and Cloudflare outages highlight how heavily the internet depends on a small number of major content delivery networks (CDNs), which hold up the internet.
CDNs offer advantages such as improving “reliability, reducing latency, and lowering transit demand,” said Ryan Polk, director of policy at the Internet Society.
“However, when too much Internet traffic is concentrated within a few providers, these networks can become single points of failure that disrupt access to large parts of the Internet,” he added.