N※N

Cloudflare's 2024 Outage: Global Internet Blip Affects AI Giants and Canva

83

  //media-entertainment.news-articles.net/content/ .. l-internet-blip-affects-ai-giants-and-canva.html
  Published in Media and Entertainment on Saturday, November 22nd 2025 at 2:34 GMT by Digit

• 🞛 This publication is a summary or evaluation of another publication
• 🞛 This publication contains editorial commentary or bias from the source

2025-11-22 179 x 224 / 12576 Bytes

2025-11-22 179 x 224 / 11465 Bytes

2025-11-22 251 x 201 / 6264 Bytes

2025-11-22 201 x 224 / 11413 Bytes

Cloudflare’s 2024 Outage: What Went Wrong and Why Iconic Services Fell Offline

In early March 2024, a near‑global internet blip rippled through the digital world: major AI platforms such as Google Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and the graphic‑design titan Canva all went dark for a short but painful period. At the heart of the disruption was Cloudflare, the company that powers a huge slice of the web’s traffic routing, content‑delivery network (CDN), and security stack. The incident has become a textbook case of how a single misstep in a cloud‑first internet backbone can cascade across dozens of high‑profile services, prompting a closer look at the fragile architecture that keeps our everyday digital lives running.

1. The Event: When Millions Lost Access

At about 12:18 AM UTC on March 2, 2024, users began reporting trouble reaching Gemini, ChatGPT, Canva, and other services that had been routed through Cloudflare’s edge network. The outage was not isolated to a handful of countries; it was observed globally, from the U.S. to Australia to the UK. By 12:48 AM UTC, the Cloudflare status page flagged a “Partial Outage” and, within the next few minutes, it was clear that the problem affected a wide swath of the Internet.

Users posted on Twitter and Reddit—links embedded in the original Digit article—highlighting the sheer scale: “Can’t even load Canva in NYC. Is this a Cloudflare thing?” “Gemini is down in Paris.” “ChatGPT’s not working anywhere.” Cloudflare’s own social‑media accounts echoed the uncertainty, with a brief tweet: “We’re experiencing a significant routing issue. Working on a fix.”

2. The Root Cause: A BGP Misconfiguration

At the core of the problem was a border‑gateway protocol (BGP) misconfiguration. BGP is the protocol that tells routers on the internet where to send traffic. Cloudflare operates thousands of edge servers around the globe, each announcing IP prefixes (blocks of IP addresses) so that other networks know where to direct traffic for Cloudflare‑hosted services.

According to the investigation summarized in the Digit piece—and corroborated by Cloudflare’s own post‑mortem—an incorrect BGP route was announced from one of Cloudflare’s new routing nodes. The announcement caused a “split‑brain” in the global routing table, making a large number of IP prefixes unreachable for the majority of the Internet. This effectively “blackholed” traffic destined for any site that had Cloudflare‑managed DNS or CDN entry points, which included Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Canva.

The misconfiguration was traced back to a human error during the rollout of a new routing configuration to an edge datacenter. A single typographical mistake in the configuration file led to a cascade of prefix withdrawals. When the error was spotted, Cloudflare’s network operations center immediately revoked the erroneous announcement, but the damage had already been done.

3. How Quickly Did Cloudflare Respond?

Once the anomaly was detected—roughly 45 minutes after the first reports—Cloudflare’s incident response team began working on a rollback. By 1:00 AM UTC, they began withdrawing the wrong routes, a process that can take time because changes propagate across the internet gradually. The service was fully restored around 2:30 AM UTC, a little over two hours after the outage began. The Digit article cites the Cloudflare status update timeline and provides screenshots of the status page: “[Link to Cloudflare Status].”

Despite the relatively swift remediation, the outage left users frustrated and many businesses that rely on real‑time AI and design tools halted in the middle of critical workflows. “We were in the middle of a client pitch,” one Canva employee recounted in an interview quoted in the article. “Canva going down in the middle of a design session is unacceptable.”

4. Who Was Affected? The Ripple Effects

While Cloudflare’s own status page listed the outage as “Partial,” the impact on downstream services was far more widespread. The Digit article catalogues a number of services that experienced downtime:

• Google Gemini – The AI chat service that Google has been touting as the “next Google Search.”
• OpenAI ChatGPT – The AI chatbot that powers countless productivity tools.
• Perplexity AI – An AI‑driven search engine that has grown in popularity.
• Canva – The web‑based graphic design platform used by millions.
• Other Cloudflare‑hosted sites – A handful of niche blogs, SaaS platforms, and small business websites also saw disruptions.

Because Cloudflare is used by hundreds of thousands of domains worldwide, the fallout was not limited to the big names. The article links to a Twitter thread (see [Link to Tweet]) where users flagged a variety of other services that were down, underscoring the scale of the outage.

5. The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters

The Digit piece goes beyond the incident itself to pose a bigger question: How resilient is the internet when a single provider’s failure can affect so many services? The article cites experts who note that many of the Internet’s high‑profile services rely on a handful of CDN and DNS providers—Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront being the top three. A misstep in any of these can ripple across a vast portion of the web.

Cloudflare’s own post‑mortem acknowledges that the incident exposed a gap in its BGP change‑management workflow. The company pledged to review and tighten its processes, including:

• Enhanced change‑control: Requiring multiple sign‑offs before a routing change is deployed.
• Improved monitoring: Adding automated BGP anomaly detection to flag unusual route announcements.
• Better redundancy: Strengthening fail‑over mechanisms for edge nodes to ensure a single node’s misconfiguration doesn’t impact the whole network.

6. What Users Can Do

While many of us do not run our own networks, the article suggests some practical steps for individuals and small businesses:

1. Diversify DNS and CDN providers where possible.
2. Set up monitoring for critical services so you’re alerted to outages faster than the providers.
3. Have a fallback plan: For instance, keep a local copy of essential assets that can be served if the CDN fails.
4. Stay informed: Follow the status pages of your primary infrastructure providers and keep an eye on industry blogs like the one on Digit.

7. Final Takeaway

Cloudflare’s March 2024 outage serves as a stark reminder that the digital ecosystem is built on layers of shared infrastructure. A single misconfigured route—rooted in a human error—can bring down services that millions rely on daily. The incident prompted an industry‑wide review of routing practices and pushed for greater transparency from CDN providers. For users, it’s a call to build resilience into their own workflows and to stay vigilant about the health of the infrastructure that underpins the modern web.

For those who want to dive deeper, the Digit article links to:

• Cloudflare’s own post‑mortem (link in the article).
• The Cloudflare status page at https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/.
• A Twitter thread where the outage was first reported.
• An open‑source BGP monitoring tool that many providers now use (link provided).

These resources give a fuller picture of the incident and the ongoing efforts to prevent a repeat.