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A significant global outage at Cloudflare this week caused widespread disruption and highlighted the scale of reliance many organisations have on unseen digital infrastructure. While the company is not widely known outside the technology sector, its services underpin a large proportion of global internet traffic, meaning even a short disruption can have far reaching consequences.

The outage affected major platforms including X, Spotify and AI tools such as ChatGPT. Although the websites themselves remained operational, users were unable to access them because Cloudflare sits between the user and the website, acting as a protective and performance enhancing layer. When this layer failed, access was effectively blocked.

Cathal Slattery, Head of Professional Services at Ekco, compared Cloudflare’s role in the online ecosystem to the plumbing or foundations of a house. Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, he noted that most people only become aware of such systems when something goes wrong.

The company reported that the issue stemmed from an automatically generated configuration file intended to manage security risks. This file grew too large and overwhelmed the software responsible for traffic handling, causing Cloudflare’s systems to crash. Given that its network routes about one fifth of global web traffic, the resulting ripple effect was significant.

This incident follows other recent outages at major providers, including Microsoft’s Azure platform and disruptions linked to Amazon that affected thousands of websites and apps such as Snapchat and Reddit. These events reinforce that even the most established technology services cannot guarantee uninterrupted operation.

Mr Slattery emphasised that service level agreements typically offer 99.9 percent uptime, meaning occasional outages are inevitable. He advised that Irish businesses should treat digital resilience as a core priority. This includes understanding which external services their operations depend on, having plans for redundancy and assessing the risks associated with relying on third party providers.

He added that organisations should test their contingency plans, ensure they have appropriate backup processes and invest in systems, procedures and staff training that support operational continuity when unexpected incidents occur.

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