Cloudflare Goes Down for Third Time in Three Months, Disrupting Major Games

Just last month, an AWS outage took out half the internet, including gaming networks and servers. Today, what was allegedly a minor outage affected the Cloudflare dashboard and related APIs. This means that servers for the PlayStation Network, Rocket League, Fortnite, Roblox, and Apex Legends were unresponsive at the start of the day. 

According to the official Cloudflare Status page, the majority of the services are now fully back online. Some sites and services in certain regions, like Turkey, Portugal, and Russia, are either rerouted or partially rerouted right now. This means that Cloudflare is essentially directing incoming traffic to secondary Cloudflare data centers in different regions. 

Cloudflare confirmed that today’s outage was not an attack, but an unexpected consequence of a configuration change to handling firewall requests. This was the third Cloudflare outage in three months.

Nothing To Worry About

The incident was brief but global in terms of reach, which is why Cloudflare was able to immediately implement a fix and reroute traffic. Official statements from many affected gaming companies, including PlayStation, are yet to come. However, their status pages and third-party reports confirm that the widespread issues are resolved at the time of writing.

Epic Games’ public status page confirms that servers for Fortnite, Rocket League, and Fall Guys are now fully operational. The PlayStation Service Status page also confirms that account management, PlayStation Store, and all gaming/social features are up and running. Interestingly enough, Cloudflare reported just two days ago that it survived the biggest DDoS attack in history. And you’re telling me a much less intrusive, intentional configuration change brought its servers down? The cybersecurity and internet infrastructure work in mysterious ways.

Regardless, even though everything is all fine and dandy, you can still expect some residual effects of this attack. We saw similar issues pop up after the AWS outage was fixed last month. This recent series of disruptions, just in the span of a few months, paints a worrying picture of a fragile online ecosystem. When a system that manages nearly 20% of global internet traffic experiences issues, the impact is immediate, global, and affects everything from casual gaming to the stock market. 

To summarize, if you were experiencing problems with the PlayStation Network or other gaming servers this morning, it’s not just you. It’s somewhat interesting that all of these outages have taken place at times when gaming traffic isn’t at its peak. Otherwise, we’d see much higher outrage.